Piana Technology LLC and its affiliates (collectively, “Piana Technology” or “Company” or “we” or “us” or “our”) is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone and applying the relevant accessibility standards to our website.
Accessibility Standards
Our website conforms to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 level AA criteria. These guidelines have been established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is an international community that develops web standards and guidelines to ensure universal accessibility. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairments,
cognitive disabilities, and more.
Our website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s user interface (“UI”) and design it to their personal needs. Additionally, the
website utilizes an artificial intelligence (“AI”) based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by visually impaired users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
Accessibility Features
Our website implements the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (“ARIA”) attributes technique, alongside various behavioral changes, to ensure visually impaired users visiting with screen-readers can read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a
screen-reader enters our site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate our site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements:
1. Screen-reader optimization: We run a process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all the website’s images. It provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an alternate text (“ALT”) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts embedded within the image using an optical character recognition (“OCR”) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website. These adjustments are compatible with popular screen
readers such as JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack.
2. Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with the Esc key, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key. Additionally, keyboard users will find content-skip
menus available at any time by clicking Alt+2 or as the first element of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus toward them as soon as they appear, not allowing the focus to drift outside. Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
Disability Profiles Supported on our Website
• Epilepsy Safe Profile: This profile enables people with epilepsy to safely use the website by eliminating the risk of seizures resulting from flashing or blinking animations and risky color combinations.
• Vision Impaired Profile: This profile adjusts the website so that it is accessible to the majority of visual impairments such as Degrading Eyesight, Tunnel Vision, Cataract, Glaucoma, and others.
• Cognitive Disability Profile: This profile provides various assistive features to help users with cognitive disabilities such as Autism, Dyslexia, CVA, and others, to focus on the essential elements more easily.
• ADHD Friendly Profile: This profile significantly reduces distractions and noise to help people with ADHD, and Neurodevelopmental disorders browse, read, and focus on the essential elements more easily.
• Visually Impaired Users Profile (Screen-readers): This profile adjusts the website to be compatible with screen-readers such as JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack. A screen- reader is installed on the blind user’s computer, and this site is compatible with it.
• Keyboard Navigation Profile (Motor-Impaired): This profile enables motor-impaired persons to operate the website using the keyboard Tab, Shift+Tab, and the Enter keys. Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
Additional UI, Design, and Readability Adjustments
• Font adjustments: Users can increase and decrease its size, change its family (type), adjust the spacing, alignment, line height, and more.
• Color adjustments: Users can select various color contrast profiles such as light, dark, inverted, and monochrome. Additionally, users can swap color schemes of titles, texts, and backgrounds with over seven different coloring options.
• Animations: Epileptic users can stop all running animations with the click of a button.
• Animations controlled by the interface include videos, GIFs, and CSS flashing transitions.
• Content highlighting: Users can choose to emphasize essential elements such as links and titles. They can also choose to highlight focused or hovered elements only.
• Audio muting: Users with hearing devices may experience headaches or other issues due to automatic audio playing. This option lets users mute the entire website instantly.
• Cognitive disorders: We utilize a search engine linked to Wikipedia and Wiktionary, allowing people with cognitive disorders to decipher the meanings of phrases, initials, slang, and others.
• Additional functions: We allow users to change cursor color and size, use a printing mode, enable a virtual keyboard, and many other functions.
Assistive Technology and Browser Compatibility
We aim to support as many browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over ninety-five percent (95%) of the user market share, including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS, and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and MAC users.
Third-Party Content
Our website may contain third-party content or links to third-party websites that are not owned or controlled by Piana Technology. We make every effort to ensure that this content is accessible; however, we cannot guarantee the accessibility of third-party content or websites.
Disclaimer and Future Improvements
At Piana Technology, we are committed to providing a website that is accessible to all individuals, including those with disabilities. We believe it is our responsibility to ensure that our website and products are usable and navigable by everyone.
While we strive to make all pages and content on our website fully accessible, some content may not yet be fully adapted to the strictest accessibility standards. This could be due to various factors, including a lack of appropriate technological solutions or difficulties in identifying
certain issues.
We are continuously working to improve the accessibility of our website by continuing to maintain and implement solutions consistent with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA.
Feedback
We are committed to ensuring that our website is accessible to everyone, and we welcome feedback from users who encounter accessibility issues. If you have any comments or suggestions on how we can improve the accessibility of our website, please contact us at
Piana Technology LLC
101 Old Mill Road
Bldg. 300
Cartersville, GA 30120
Website: piana.tech
Email: info@piana.tech
Last Updated: 05/03/2023
Piana Technology develops high performance fiber-based technologies that push common materials and systems toward a sustainable circular economy. With over 440 years of experience, Piana is a family-owned business at the forefront of innovation in the textile and smart fiber tech industries.
