Accessibility of Portuguese Public Universities' sites

Abstract

The aim of this study is to characterise the accessibility of all Public Portuguese Universities' homepages and the support services they offer to disabled students. We employed two different online automatic tools: using the ‘eXaminator’ to determine the conformance of websites to checkpoints; using ‘HERA’ to identify any automatically detectable errors or checkpoints. The choice of these tools was according to the Portuguese Government recommendation, to public in general, as the ones best suited to perform accessibility check-ups. Thus, we used those tools to present a brief characterisation of the sites' accessibility. The data collection took place in 2007, 2008 and 2009 to identify differences. Following this work, we chose all the sites that stated to have specific services to support disabled students and made a detailed analysis to: (a) identify existing university services to disabled students; (b) identify possible relations among the accessibility' scores in the universities that offer services to disabled students. The main results of this study were as follows: schools overall accessibility of the webpage were not acceptable and only 12.5% sites had information regarding supporting services to disabled students. The data collected identified an overall web accessibility improvement during the 2007–2008, followed by a stabilisation of the results.

Keywords:

• Students
• web accessibility
• education

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

1. UMIC is a Portuguese public agency that operates within the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through the coordination of policies for Information Society and mobilizing them through dissemination, qualification & research activities.

2. The eXaminator tool only produces reports in Portuguese and Spanish. It gives data about the number of elements in the page, the conformance level and web@x index attained and gives the opportunity to look for more qualitative information.