What Accessibility means?
By this word we mean a particular instrument’s requirement (web site or other) intentionally projected and realized to be used by a very wide range of users.
For this purpose we must follow established rules from the so-called Universal Planning (also called Design for all) which says that any project’s details must always take into account the variety of needs of all users.
Accessibility has a worldwide-shared measure system.

The accessibility of a web document concerns both syntax and semantics. The first one refers to the code of the written page and can be checked out with the help of software, the so-called validators. The second one deals with the meaning of words and can be checked by man only.

Disability
There are several meanings for "disability", the most current (whose origins are legislative) refers to the person’s inability to carry out by his own (even by help) at least one of the main daily life’s activity.
It is important to underline that every definition, even the main one from ICF (International classification of functioning, Disability and Health) speaks of relative disability, which is referred to the fellow’s incapacity, but only limited to the context in which he is placed. The fellow is not disabled, except for one function and one circumstance.

Usability
According to ISO, Usability is the efficaciousness, the efficiency and the satisfaction of specific users reaching specific targets in particular environment.
Usability is a general word explaining the efficiency of an instrument, which means the reliability of the task for which the object has been projected.
Referring to a site, usability concerns everything the site can include: contents, form, linguistic, used technology, graphic elements, a model user as reference mark, facility on finding what you’re looking for, the organization of your contents. In other words, it is a general property that makes it easy to surf and use.
On the contrary, accessibility is a very precise characteristic and only concerns used technology. Notwithstanding usability DOES NOT HAVE a worldwide –shared measure system, W3C has published some guidelines that should be definitely followed if you want to create usable web site.

Assisting Technologies
These are the ones compensating functional limitations, making independent life easier and allowing disabled and elderly people to achieve their potentiality. An accessible web site is an example.

Help
By help, we mean instead "an instrument for everyday life", which can be useful to any person in his daily life. Some help examples are: forks, washing machines, wheel-chairs, orthopedic shoes or less, mobiles, computers and so on.

Validator
It is an analyzing program for the site and for the rules checks. There are validators checking the correctness of a site’s html code (we will call them html validators), other ones verify his accessibility (accessibility validates).
Those programs may lead remote analyzes, that is to say that, after they ask you the address of the site to validate, they analyze it and verify the correctness. At the end, they produce a final report.

Let’s see some examples:

• The official html-validator of W3C;
• Bobby, the most current English accessibility validator;
• Torquemada. The Italian accessibility validator;
• Cynthia says: the automatic checking accessibility test.

Don’t forget that accessibility is not a requirement to acquire only with the simple validation of a software. Indeed, the software can check only the syntax html of a page but not the semantic! We remember that, accessibility concerns both the aspects.

ARFD Portal and Accessibility
The portal of Dipartimento Regionale Azienda Foreste Demaniali has been projected by respecting of the guiding lines concerning the accessibility of the web sites (W3C) and according to the law in force (consulting by the link sideways) with regard to the law 9 January 2004, n.4. The portal pages are dynamics and use ASP scripting technology on server IIS; the pages displayed by the user are written in html 4.01 Strict. The layout has been performed by using styling sheet papers respecting the syntax a CSS 2.0.