Making Public Administration services more accessible and inclusive for all citizens, even for those with temporary or permanent disabilities. It is one of the objectives of measure 1.4.2 of the PNRR which includes the publication of the new dashboard accessibilita.agid.gov.it which presents, for the first time in Italy, monitoring data on the accessibility of Public Administration websites.
Available from 31 March 2023, in line with the deadlines set in the Operational Plan of the measure, the site allows you to consult the list of the most frequent errors relating to 14,483 sites extracted from PA Indexanalyzed with automatic systems in the first quarter of the year.
“This is a step forward in the right direction to ensure equal access rights to public administration services – declared the Undersecretary of State in charge of Technological Innovation, Alessio Butti – so that no citizen is excluded from the benefits that new technology is able to bring to all of our lives.”
The accessibility project. The Agency for Digital Italy is the implementing body of measure 1.4.2 of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, for an investment of 80 million euros, which aims to improve the accessibility of digital public services for all citizens and the promotion and dissemination of the theme of accessibility within the public administration and for private individuals.
In addition to carrying out specific training and technical support activities aimed at the PA, the project provides for monitoring, through an automated system called MAUVE++created in collaboration with the CNR, of 31 of the 50 criteria set by the WCAG Guidelines and Principles 2.1 on accessibility published by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Thanks to this tool, which photographs the current state of the PA sites, it will also be possible to monitor changes over time, with a view to transparency and continuous improvement of digital services.
The most frequent mistakes. The errors most frequently encountered on PA sites concern the lack of a visual indicator of focus when users navigate with the keyboard rather than the mouse (33.8%), the presence of information conveyed exclusively through colour, such as links that are not underlined (19.9%) and the presence of text with an insufficient level of color contrast with the background (11.8%).
The next steps. The Agency for Digital Italy will also provide the PAs with technical-IT and regulatory support, through the specialist support of 28 experts and the sharing of WebKit to develop and redesign digital services. In addition, financial support of 53 million euros will be disbursed to 55 target PAs to carry out specific training activities on accessibility, to ensure that at least 50% of the assistive technologies required are made available to all workers with disabilities and reduce the number of types of errors on at least 2 digital services by at least 50%.