Web Compliance
Standard conformance improves competitive position Standard conformance of their web sites, web shops etc. supports the competitive position of businesses. It leads to better search engine rankings and improves the sites’ usability, in particular for older users, a rapidly growing group of customers. Fraunhofer FIT develops software that helps design and check web sites for compliance. Info: carlos.verlasco@fit.fraunhofer.de
Web compliance has a number of legal aspects, such as conformance with competition law, privacy or youth protection regulations and, for public bodies, accessibility. Here, national rules are based on the international guidelines WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). In the consumer business, accessibility helps make web sites user-friendly for older people, who often have age-related limitations, e.g. in acuteness of vision, that are similar to those of handicapped people and who thus benefit from similar visual design features. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was ratified in February 2011, will have significant consequences for many IT companies. This convention makes accessibility a compulsory feature in public procurement and gives people with disabilities the right to an accessible workplace. Here, beyond web sites for the public, the intranet applications are affected. Irrespective of these legal requirements, organizations benefit from web sites that are implemented according to current technical standards, because correct use of the grammars published by W3C produces valid web pages. Only compliance with W3C guarantees that a web site is up to the diverse requirements of new web technologies, e.g. that pages are rendered fast on smartphones or tablets. A good search engine ranking also profits from the validity of the web pages, as search engines like Google have problems processing faulty pages. Fraunhofer FIT’s imergo® toolset supports design and validation of web sites according to legal accessibility requirements and W3C standards. It thus also guarantees compatibility with advanced technologies. The scope of imergo®’s tests can be extended on an individual basis to include, for instance, rules resulting from competition law or Corporate Design rules. We keep imergo® up-to-date by incorporating modified regulations or standards as well as new requirements from the technology side. In the European I2Web project, which focuses on Inclusive Future-Internet Web Services, we are adding a simulation tool to imergo ®. Web designers can use it to see, early on in the design and implementation process, how different groups of users perceive their design, e.g. people with impaired ability to see or smartphone users.
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