Accessibility statement

1. The starting point, stated precisely

We claim no certified conformance. Exhible has not (yet) commissioned an accessibility audit from a third party, so nowhere do we write «WCAG 2.1 AA compliant» — and we will not write it until that audit exists. What follows is the list of what we have done and verified, and of what is missing.

2. What we have done

2.1 The audio guide (Visitor PWA)

• The language is declared to the screen reader. The page declares the language you are actually hearing and reading, and updates it when you switch. If a zone is unavailable in your language and falls back to Italian, the text says so: without that, speech synthesis reads Chinese with Italian phonetics.
• A player you can operate without seeing or touching the screen. The progress bar is a native control: reachable by keyboard, adjustable with screen-reader gestures, and it announces time in words («1 minute 12 seconds of 4 minutes») instead of a percentage. ←/→ for ±5 seconds, ↑/↓ for ±10.
• Labels in the visitor’s own language, in all six catalogue languages — not Italian only.
• Animated product Scenes have a complete text equivalent (name, claim, key points, specifications), read by the screen reader in place of the animation.
• Synchronised subtitles on every zone and in every language: already part of the product, and they cover people who cannot hear.
• Reduced motion: if your device asks for less animation, the guide removes it — including the animated Scenes, which become static.
• Text scales with the browser’s font-size setting, and pinch zoom is never blocked.
• Contrast of text verified on the guide’s dark theme, with touch targets of at least 44×44 px.

2.2 The accessible plaque

Every Exhible customer, on every plan and at no extra cost, can download a print file for the plaque that goes next to the QR code: a raised frame you can find by touch, an orientation notch, large high-contrast text and grade 1 braille. At the same spot where a sighted visitor points a camera, a blind visitor rests their phone on an NFC tag: a tap requires no aiming, focusing or framing.

The PDF includes the technical sheet for the printer — relief height, no varnish over the code, NFC tag placement, mounting — because those instructions are for whoever prints it, not for whoever orders it.

3. What is missing, today

• No independent audit. The checks above are our own. Until a third-party audit exists, there is no declaration of conformance.
• The braille and the relief have not yet been validated by a blind person. The measurements come from the reference standards (Marburg Medium, ISO 17049), but none of us reads braille: the review with the Italian Union of the Blind and Partially Sighted is planned and has not happened yet.
• No audio description of the product Scenes. Today the alternative to the animated Scenes is textual, not spoken: a screen-reader user hears it in their own synthetic voice, not in the guide’s narrating voice.
• The plaque does not solve discovery. It solves using the code once you know it is there. A blind visitor does not know a plaque is on the wall: that is solved by the venue’s staff, by a constant and predictable position across all zones, and by a notice at the entrance. We write this in the material we hand to customers too, because it is what tells them what they have to do.
• Other surfaces are not covered by this statement. The exhible.com website, the customer dashboard and the production panel have not been through the same review. The priority was the audio guide, which is what the public uses.

4. Reporting a problem

If you hit a barrier in an Exhible audio guide, write to [email protected] with «Accessibility» in the subject. We reply within 5 working days, even if only to say what we understood and how long we expect to take. If it helps, include the guide’s link, your device and the assistive technology you were using — but a two-line report is worth just as much.

We are also looking for blind and partially sighted people willing to try the guide and the plaque and tell us what does not work. It is work, and we treat it as such.

5. Regulatory context (this is not legal advice)

The European Accessibility Act (EU Directive 2019/882, transposed in Italy as Legislative Decree 82/2022) applies from 28 June 2025 to several categories of products and services, e-commerce among them, with exemptions for micro-enterprises. Whether the obligation applies to you depends on your activity and your size: we cannot tell you that, and anyone who tells you without knowing your company is selling you something.

What we can say is narrower: the work described above exists because an inaccessible audio guide is an obstacle we would be adding to a customer’s touchpoint. Accessibility is included in every Exhible plan and will never be a paid add-on — charging for access to people who are already excluded is not defensible.

6. How we keep this page current

This statement is reviewed at every change that touches the audio guide or the plaque, and in any case at least once a year. When one of the items in point 3 is closed, it moves to point 2 with the date of the check — not before.