As the Seznam.cz company grows, our social responsibility rises, too. We understand helping others as a thank you for our own success. And as the support of innovation is one of the basic corporate values, we try to bring such innovations that will help everyone to use the Internet.
We officially began to make Seznam accessible back in 2006, yet this does not mean that we had not dealt with accessibility before that. In 2000, for instance, our company acquired the Blindfriendly certificate for its portals Seznam.cz and Novinky.cz.
In 2006, the “fated” meeting of the then R&D Director Mr. Vlastimil Pečinka and Mr. Radek Seifert of the Tereza Centre in Prague (now the ELSA Centre of the Czech Technical University in Prague: www.elsa.cvut.cz) took place. Mr. Seifert rightly convinced Mr. Pečinka then that a long-term, systematic work on Seznam’s accessibility is worth the effort.
It was Mr. Lukáš Marvan, who was then commissioned to take care of accessibility of our services. Besides the initial deepening of his knowledge about these issues, he also prepared a method to implement simple rules for making Seznam accessible into our corporate practice in collaboration with the Tereza Centre. The simplicity of these rules turned out to be a key factor concerning their adoption by our employees.
Seznam aims to increase accessibility of the widest possible range of our services. We do not approach accessibility in a dogmatic way, though, as we always strive for a reasonable, functional compromise. Neither do we consider the process of making Seznam accessible as finished and we still try to get better.
Other activities concerning accessibility:
Besides the general improvement of accessibility of our web pages, Seznam also engages in other projects that help with an easier access to information.
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Barrier-free Fulltext – a specially programmed web page with web search results for the best possible readability with a screen reader.
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Keyboard Shortcuts Standard – in unique collaboration with the Atlas, Centrum, iDnes and Jyxo companies, Seznam introduced a unified implementation of keyboard shortcuts on web pages.
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CAPTCHA API – we enhanced the freely available interface for automatic recognition of persons and their distinction from spambots with a voice output so that it ceased to be a barrier for blind users.
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WCAG 2.0 Translation Authorization – Mr. Lukáš Marvan was involved in authorizing the Czech translation of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
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Tactile Mapy.cz – in collaboration with the ELSA Centre at CTU Prague, we are developing special source data for maps that will enable tactile map printing.
