General

Accessibility

What is accessibility?

Accessibility is the possibility of accessing information or services without a user's disabilty being a potential barrier.

These disabilities may be physical, technological or structural in origin.

Therefore, a tool is accessible when it does not require users to have, permanently or temporarily, a specified level of intelligence, hearing, sight, mobility or capacity for remembering.
 

Web accessibility

CRITERIA CAIXAHOLDING, S.A., strives to make its portal accessible, regardless of the kind of hardware, software, web infrastructure, language, culture, geographical location or capacity of its users.

The aim is to verify the accessibility of all content on the portal. To do this, Criteria CaixaHolding has followed the guidelines of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
 

The W3C as a guide to web accessibility

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium that sets standards for the World Wide Web. It was born in the 1990s to encourage the development and inter-operability of the web, emphasizing its universality.

In 1997, the W3C created the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to provide guidelines and resources to help make the web accessible.

The W3C developed what are known as the Web Contents Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), whose main function is to guide the design of web pages towards an accessible model. 
 

Certificates

The web contents directives (WCAG 1.0) for level AA web accessibility have already been introduced in the company's corporate portals. Nevertheless, the aim is to obtain this accessibility certification in every possible area.

To meet the requirements set by the WAI, web standards were used in the construction of its pages, using HTML for content and CSS for appearance.

For example, the following were introduced:

  • Alert when links open in new windows
  • Alert when there is a change of format
  • Alternative texts in images
  • Use of style sheets to control the layout and presentation
  • Use of headings to explain pages’ logical structure
  • Metadata to add linguistic information