Toshiba Web Accessibility Guidelines
Accompanying the spread of the Internet, the importance of corporate Web sites is increasing and the number of people who use the World Wide Web as a means of accessing information is also rising. Since The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - an international standards organization for the Web - announced its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 in May 1999, initiatives to make Web content more accessible have progressed at many companies in Europe, North America and elsewhere.
In these circumstances, Toshiba Group has worked to increase its Web site accessibility in accordance with the Basic Commitment of the TOSHIBA group. We aim to ensure that Toshiba Group Web sites are easy-to-use sites where all visitors can access the necessary information.
Measures to Implement the Guidelines
- Anticipate that users with individual requirements will visit Web sites depending on the purpose of the Web site content: people with different objectives, people with and without physical disabilities, people of all ages, people with different levels of experience, and so forth.
The information disseminated on Toshiba Web sites is a mixture of information targeted at a great number of users (for instance, company information and information on products for the general public), and information targeted at specific users (for instance, content for business partners, content requiring membership, content for children). At times it is not possible to provide all information in a form that is easy to use for all users. However, Toshiba aims to provide information in a method appropriate to the anticipated users according to the purpose of publishing each Web site. - Anticipate that the Internet access environments of the individual users anticipated in 1. are diverse, and endeavour to ensure that visitors can easily obtain, understand, and manipulate necessary information.
Support technology employed to enable users to access Web sites is provided by many vendors in accordance with a variety of standards and is upgraded as the occasion demands. Also, the types, combinations, and individual settings of support technologies used by Web users vary according to the purpose and conditions of use. For these reasons, technical and cost constraints make unrealistic the operation of Web sites that support all the support technologies used by visitors to Toshiba's Web sites. In this regard, in operating Web sites Toshiba aims to take note of these trends so as to support as many of these technologies as possible, focusing on frequently used standard support technologies. - Endeavour to ensure that all the users anticipated in 1. are able to smoothly obtain, understand, and manipulate necessary information from every Internet access environment anticipated in 2.