Who are we?
The Visible Foundation operating since 2009 aims to counter the digital and social exclusion.
The main goal of the Foundation is to allow all citizens an open access to online resources regardless of their age, disability, wealth, hardware and software.
For years, we have been directing the attention of the public, administration and business to the problem of accessibility of websites for people at risk of digital exclusion.
We actively participate in the change of Polish law. With our help, the regulation on the National Interoperability Framework of 2012 imposes an obligation to adapt public websites to the needs of people with disabilities, and from 2014 the law requires those facilities from telecommunication services providers.
We provided opinions on the draft Act on the digital accessibility of websites and mobile applications of public entities.
We are members of the Accessibility Council of the Accessibility Plus – polish government programme.
As part of the Accessibility Council, we have initiated the AccessTech working group at the Ministry of Funds and Regional Policy, which aims to promote new technologies that support accessibility for people with individual needs. This group is the beginning of a new trend model of the already existing entities: GovTech, FinTech, MedTech, InsureTech, PayTech.
We lead the Accessibility Group (Artur Marcinkowski - Coordinator), whose goal is to identify good practices and promote solutions that increase access to online resources, organizing workshops and seminars in the field of digital inclusion and preparing recommendations for the Digitization Council appointed by the Ministry of Digital Affairs.
We consistently monitor the level of application of the international accessibility standard, WCAG 2.0 (WCAG 2.1), by the Polish administration. Every year we publish an Accessibility Report. This is Poland’s only study of administrative progress in the field of publishing accessible content on the Internet.
Every year in the Polish Sejm, for 7 years now, we organize the Digital Inclusion conference which is fully accessible to participants. . During the conferences we present, for example the Accessibility Report and the results of the "Website without Barriers" competition.
The research of the Visible Foundation is characterized by professionalism and reliability. We owe it to our experts who developed the Methods of digital accessibility of websites evaluation in accordance with the principles of WCAG 2.1
We audit websites, but also applications and other digital tools, we also support the implementation of digital accessibility of the most important public institutions (e.g. PFRON - The State Fund for Rehabilitation of Disabled People, the Ministry of Digital Affairs) and business (e.g. Orange Polska, Santander Bank Polska).
Together with the Educational Research Institute, we have prepared descriptions of ten new Qualifications in the field of accessibility as part of the Integrated Qualifications System (ZSK). As soon as we become the Certifying Authority we will be entitled to grant new qualifications, including: Auditing website accessibility in accordance with the WCAG standard or Implementing accessibility standards in organisations.
Our Experts conduct trainings covering a wide range of issues related to online accessibility. In 2019 alone, we trained over 530 people in digital accessibility.
Since 2014, we have been implementing the Polish Accessibility Academy project, under which we have trained over 1,800 people for free, the free website templates we have developed have been downloaded nearly 16,000. times. Our Experts have a number of publications. All of them are available free of charge on our website. Among them are:
- Method of assessing the accessibility of a digital website in accordance with WCAG 2.1, Przemysław Marcinkowski, Marcin Luboń, dr Izabela Mrochen, Monika Szczygielska, Artur Marcinkowski
- WCAG 2.0 Manual of Good Practices, Artur Marcinkowski, Przemysław Marcinkowski
- Website availability research based on WCAG, Artur Marcinkowski
- Accessible multimedia, Monika Szczygielska
