Posting the Accessibility Symbol does not guarantee that this place is 100% accessible. Using this symbol only demonstrates that there has been made an effort in order to increase  the accessibility at this place according to the Minister’s Council Resolution Nº97/ 99, about Internet Access at Public Administration by Special Needed Citizens.

In Portugal the Internet Accessibility has became a Public Administration law by the Minister’s Council Resolution 97/ 99 as a Government reply to what was known as the first electronic petition for the Portuguese Parliament. In August 1999 the so called “ Public Administration Internet Accessibility sites for Special Needed Citizens”  obligated every General-Administration and other matched services, as well as the public institutes in their variant modalities.

At the “State Direct and Indirect Administration Web Site Construction Guide” "Guia de Boas Práticas na Construção de Web Sites da Administração Directa e Indirecta do Estado" (2003 version), there are several references. These are considered of good practice, but are directly related to accessibility. Apart from that, there is also a specific chapter dedicated to “Special Needed Citizens Facilities”.

The Accessibility Directrix of the Web Content, from the Initiative for Web Accessibility (“Iniciativa pela Acessibilidade Web” - WAI) from W3C, supply a sum of 14 directrixes. The first twelve are related to one of the most important principles of Accessibility: the principle of harmonious transformation. In practice, this principle allows for a certain text element, audio or image, to transform itself harmoniously into itch of the other two (transform text into audio, audio into text, text into image, image into text, etc.). The remaining gives an approach of questionable navigation while at a Web page.

But not only the Special Needed People benefit from information that incorporate accessibility directrixes. When these principles are applied they facilitate the Web contends accessibility for a variety of navigation devices, such as the telephone, hand portable assistants, kiosks, net applications, etc. Making these contends more accessible to a larger variety of devices leads to a bigger possibility for people to access them at the most diverse situations. Technology for its own earns “reading capacities” an “interpretation”. For example, search engines earn the capacity of searching for audio tracks and also of researching elements such as pictures. Some times navigators are able to identify for themselves, in a document collection, where the index is, and have the capacity to negotiate with the server which is the user’s favourite language.  Technologies like screen readers, for blind people use, earn the capacity to distinguish a paragraph from a heading.

The challenge of Accessibility is big, but at the same time very fascinating.