Accessibility

Our mission

At Casalini Libri our mission has always been to support and further the dissemination of culture. We have made significant progress through the years, providing increasingly advanced tools to facilitate access to academic research and cultural content for scholars from all over the world. Since the early 2000s our Digital Division and Torrossa web platform have offered libraries and institutions the possibility to consult academic texts in the Humanities and Social Sciences in digital format.
We consider it essential to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to use Torrossa for study and research and have made it our priority to make Torrossa accessible to blind, visually impaired and dyslexic users.

Our collaboration with the LIA Foundation

In 2021, in the context of the overall renewal of its technological infrastructure, the Casalini Libri-Erasmus-Houtschild-@Cult group has recently embarked on an important collaboration with the LIA Foundation for Accessible Italian Books. The considerable experience of LIA in this field will be instrumental in helping us to acquire the skills necessary to make our platform accessible to people with low vision or dyslexia, allowing us to respond promptly to new European regulations and to ensure full compliancy with the European Accessibility Act when it comes into force in 2025. The LIA Foundation was established in 2014 from the shared desire of the Italian Publishers Association and the Italian Blind and Visually Impaired Union to make digital content accessible to all potential readers. A member of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), EDRLab (European Digital Reading Laboratory) and DAISY Consortium, LIA plays a leading role in accessibility at an international level, collaborating with EDItEUR for the definition of the accessibility standards of metadata and participating the principal international working groups dealing with research and development for standards and accessible reading solutions.

Our aims

Defined with the LIA Foundation, our intense program of activities will be developed over a period of approximately three years. The first phase of the project was launched with a training day to improve the knowledge and awareness of accessibility in all areas of our company and among our collaborators. An audit of the Torrossa platform by the LIA Foundation to analyze and identify the navigation flow, the touch points, the structure code and define the areas of intervention is already under way, as is specialised training for our programmers and web developers by the LIA team of accessible publishing and assistive technologies. We aim to adapt the Torrossa platform to conform with accessibility standards by the end of 2021, referring to internationally recognized requirements for rendering Web content and reading solutions as accessible as possible for people with disabilities: Once the first phase is complete, from 2022 onwards we will focus on strengthening our synergy with publishers towards the objective of publishing new digital content in a natively accessible format, evaluating the content, catalogue and availability for each publisher individually.
This page will be updated to show the achievements, milestones and progress of this important project, which begins with a focus on Torrossa but will progressively involve all Casalini Libri websites.

Your views

Feedback from our users is very important to us, given the complexity of this project. Should you, while using our websites, need any clarification on how to access them or have any comments and suggestions regarding accessibility, please write to us at accessibility@casalini.it.
Latest update: March 2021