Tuesday, January 14, 2014

The Farfalla Project: an open and cloud solution for accessibility

By this post, I'd like to introduce you the Farfalla Project: an innovative solution for web-accessibility, entirely based on a cloud and interoperable techonology. It is an independent project, launched by an Italian researcher named Andrea Mangiatordi (Bicocca University of Milan) and released as free and open source software under a GNU Affero General Public License.
Here some basic information from the official website:
Farfalla is a web application for enhancing accessibility of any website. It is meant to be easy to configure and to use.
We want to provide users with a lightweight and flexible solution, which can be always available in the cloud, for free.
Because we think that accessing information on the Web is a right for all.
You can try it right now: you only have to click on the bar on the upper-right part of this page to select a profile. Every profile allows accessing different kinds of resources, from text magnification to an onscreen keyboard. We will add more tools in the future, so if you can’t find anything useful, you could try contacting us and explaining your needs. We would be glad to help!
You can participate to Farfalla project and substain it in various ways. It largely depends on what are your needs and skills.
If you are a user and you are willing to give and get help, you can use our bugtracker. Through it, you can tell us what doesn’t work and what you want to be looked into at first.
If you are a developer and you are interested in supporting this project, you can subscribe to the developers mailing list.
The project won two important international awards: the Judges Award for the Microsoft Web Accessibility Challenge 2011 during W4A2011 and the first prize at Lifted by the Cloud: Visions of Cloud Enhanced Accessibility (a challenge by the USA Federal Communications Commission).

If you are webmaster, you can improve the accessibility of your website by adding this solution as a new feature. Think about it.

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