Accessibility statement

What this page states, and what it does not

This page does not claim that the site is accessible. It states what we have measured, with which tools, and where those tools stop.

The distinction is not a formality. An accessibility standard is verified through an audit — a person going through the site criterion by criterion, with real assistive technology. No such audit has ever been carried out on this site. Writing “compliant” on the strength of the automated checks we run would be a claim nobody has verified, and it would sit in the very document that is supposed to tell you how much you can rely on us.

The standard we aim at

Our reference is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2, level AA: the standard European law assumes, and the one we work against when we design a page.

It is a stated goal, not a certified result. The difference between those two things is what this whole page is about.

What we measure, and with what

Automated checks run on every change to the site. These are all of them:

• axe-core, the automated accessibility analysis library, run over a declared set of pages and at several screen widths. The check refuses to pass if the analysis examined no rules at all: a check that looked at nothing is not a green check;
• touch target sizes, which must stay at least 44 × 44 pixels, and a minimum text size;
• the absence of horizontal scrolling at phone widths, and tables that scroll inside their own container instead of widening the page;
• colour contrast on interface components, as far as an automated library can compute it.

All the textual content of this site is rendered by the server: the page you receive is complete before any script runs. That is not an accessibility criterion in itself, but a good deal of what is depends on it.

Where these checks stop

Automated analysis covers part of the criteria, and it is worth saying which part it does not. Left outside, among other things: contrast of text inside an image, reading order when a page is traversed by keyboard or screen reader, plain-language comprehensibility, and above all whether a text alternative is meaningful — an empty or generic description passes an automated check and helps nobody.

So: no automated tool can say that this site meets the standard. It can only say that it found no errors of a certain class on the pages it looked at.

Barriers we know about

We do not have a list of known barriers verified by people, because we have not yet run the verification that would produce one. The two areas where we know our measurements are insufficient are the figures in the labs and in the research documents — where the content is often a chart or a formula, and the text alternative is a writing job rather than a coding one — and keyboard navigation through the more complex interactive components.

Once a verification with people and assistive technology has been carried out, this section will carry the real list, including the barriers still open and not only the ones closed.

How to report a barrier

If any part of this site is not usable for you, write to us at info@cryptoverso.net. It helps to know which page, what you were trying to do, and which combination of browser and assistive technology you were using: without those three details a report is often not reproducible.

We handle accessibility reports the way we handle bug reports, and with the same priority: a barrier is a defect of the site, not a request for a favour.

Why this page exists, if it is not required

Italian legislative decree 82/2022, which transposes European directive 2019/882, does not apply to microenterprises providing services: fewer than ten people employed and, together with that, either an annual turnover or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding two million euro. Whoever publishes this site is below both thresholds.

Two clarifications, because these are the two points where people get it wrong. First: being a natural person rather than a company exempts you from nothing — the decree addresses economic operators, “natural or legal persons”, and the European notion of an enterprise is indifferent to legal form. What exempts is size. Second: even private parties who are subject to the decree are not required to publish an accessibility statement — that obligation applies to public administrations.

This page, then, discharges no obligation, and it is not the statement template prescribed for regulated parties: filling in that template without being one of them would produce a false document in a public register.

It exists for two reasons. The first is that the exemption is a matter of size, so it falls away by itself the day we grow: better to have the page, and the work behind it, before that day rather than all at once. The second is that anyone who runs into a barrier deserves to know where to write, no matter how small we are.