The election contenders, when they created their websites, didn’t take into account the fact that these will also be visited by persons with special needs, including persons with visual impairments. Of 23 election contestants, only 19 have active websites and none of these is fully accessible to persons with visual impairments, said Ion Ciobanu, expert who audited the websites of election runners as part of a monitoring effort of INFONET Alliance.
In a news conference at IPN, Ion Ciobanu said the websites were analyzed from the perspective of blind persons and persons with visual impairments. The persons with a severe visual impairment access information available on the computer or mobile phone through software with synthetic voice installed on these devices, which can read information from the website. The persons with vision higher than 10% not always use the audio software, but use text expansion and background color selection tools. This way they adjust the website for being readable.
Ion Ciobanu noted the carried out analysis showed that no website has text expansion and diminution buttons and no photo is accompanied by a description and the persons with visual impairments cannot find out the content of the pictures posted on the website. The persons with visual impairments have access only to the news items published on the website. Five of the election contenders posted their electoral platforms in the format of a photo or in PDF format and these cannot be read by text-to-speech software.
INFONET Alliance executive director Victor Koroli said that of nine websites of ministries, only two contain elements accessible to persons with visual impairments, of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research and of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Social Protection. Bub the access to information is a fundamental human right.
