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Press release
- 24.01.1900
- Hamburg Airport: Barrier-free internet access
Navigate without a mouse; the PC is able to read screen contents; font sizes can be selected as required – these are some of the criteria required to provide access to the internet for the disabled. To tie in with the “European Year of People with Disabilities 2003”, Hamburg Airport has launched a barrier-free version of the “Services for the Disabled” pages on the Airport’s website. A barrier-free website is one that can be ac-cessed and used with ease by people with disabilities without any help from others.
The new pages in Hamburg Airport’s website have been designed to comply with the guidelines of the Federal Law on Equal Opportunities for Disabled People. For instance, the pages can be accessed directly with the keyboard instead of a mouse, which greatly eases navigation for internet users with impaired mobility or coordination skills. Blind users can use a screenreader to have the information on these pages read aloud to them, while users with visual disabilities can adapt the size of the fonts on the pages to suit their vision. The design of the pages has been deliberately kept as simple as possible and the structure is clear and concise. A button on the Airport’s homepage takes disabled visitors directly to the barrier-free pages without the need for additional clicks.
The Federal Law on Equal Opportunities for Disabled People defines binding rules for barrier-free access to the internet. These rules are based on the access guidelines for web content set up by the international www-consortium (W3C), the central committee for the definition of internet standards.
While all public authority websites must have implemented these guidelines by 2005, compliance is still voluntary for other websites. Hamburg Airport is one of the first air-ports in Germany to provide barrier-free access for disabled users and hopes that this new service will enable as many users as possible to access the Airport’s wide range of information with ease. To see the site, please go to http://www.ham.airport.de/