PORTUGUESE WEB ACCESSIBILITY SNAPSHOT

Status of the Portuguese Websites Regarding Accessibility Levels

Ramiro Gonçalves, José Martins, Manuel Martins, Jorge Pereira and Henrique Mamede

GECAD - University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Vila Real, Portugal

Keywords: Website, Accessibility, W3C, Guidelines, Evaluation.

Abstract: The Internet is extremely important for the publishing of information and for the interaction between the

society elements. Due to this, it’s essential that the web presents itself accessible to all, including those with

any kind of disability. An accessible web may help the handicapped citizens interact with the society in a

more active way. This paper presents a study made with a universe of 777 Portuguese biggest enterprises,

using a W3C referenced tool (SortSite), and presents some statistical results according to the Portuguese

Classification of the Enterprises Activities. The achieved results present a serious troubled reality that’s

preventing the disabled citizens from having the same access rights to the World Wide Web as the “non-

disabled” citizens.

1 INTRODUCTION

According to the European Commission all the

disabled citizens can be better integrated in society

through the use of Information and Communication

Technologies - ICT, but for this to happen, these

same technologies must be accessible to all (EU,

2008).

In the last two decades a very important change

in the economical and social activities has occurred.

The ICT have contributed in a significant way to this

change (Socrates, 2007).

According to Ban Ki-Moon, it’s internationally

consensual that the Information and communications

technologies have a central role to play in the quest

for development, dignity and peace (Ki-Moon,

2007).

The ICT have become indispensable for the

social and economical evolution of society. As a

result of this, one of the social factors to be

considered is the accessibility to all available

resources, including the Web. According to Tim

Berners-Lee, the power of the web is the possibility

of access to all available resources by everyone and

its universality (Out-Law, 2006).

2 WEB ACCESSIBILITY IN THE

WORLD

2.1 Web Accessibility Concepts and

Concerns

The term accessibility can easily be defined has the

possibility of disabled people interact with a

product, resource, service or activity has normal

people would. In what concerns the ICT, we can

define accessibility as the creation of interfaces that

are perceived, operable and easy to understand for

people with a wide range of features. This includes

all deficiencies, functional limitations, including a

visual impairment, hearing, physical, cognitive and

neurological (W3C 2008).

2.2 Web Accessibility World

Regulations

According to the European Commission, there are

about 37 million European Citizens that present

some sort of disability or impairment, that need

access to all web content (EU, 2002). As an

example, in the United Kingdom, there’s an estimate

that the disabled citizens present a market value of

about 120 billion pounds (Freedman, 2008).

The World Health Organization – WHO claims

that about 10% of the world population suffers, from

223

Gonçalves R., Martins J., Martins M., Pereira J. and Mamede H. (2010).

PORTUGUESE WEB ACCESSIBILITY SNAPSHOT - Status of the Portuguese Websites Regarding Accessibility Levels.

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Human-Computer Interaction, pages 223-226

DOI: 10.5220/0002905602230226

 SciTePress

some kind of disability or incapacity. This number

clearly shows the existing need for health and

rehabilitation services. Due to this, the WHO created

an action plan called “Disability and Rehabilitation

Action-Plan 2006-2010”, whose mission goes not

only, for trying to disseminate and create awareness

of this reality throughout the world community, but

also to create initiatives that help in the process of

recovery and re-integration of disabled people back

to society (WHO, 2006).

2.2.1 W3C Accessibility Initiative

Web content accessibility has been a priority for

various world entities, such as the W3C consortium

which in 1999 created the World Accessibility

Initiative – WAI. This initiative was created with the

aim of being a parallel organization to the W3C and

its mission was to develop guidelines that would be

understood as the international standards for web

accessibility; as well as to develop support materials

for a better understanding and development of web

accessibility, and to develop new resources through

international cooperation (W3C, 2008b).

2.2.2 Portuguese Web Accessibility

Regulations and Concerns

In the year 2002, the Portuguese National Institute of

Statistics - INE promoted a demographic study

named “Censos 2002 – População residente com

deficiência segundo o grau de incapacidade e sexo”.

According to this study, there were 634000

Portuguese citizens with some kind of disability.

This number represents 6% of the entire Portuguese

population (INE 2002).

3 WEB ACCESSIBILITY

EVALUATION

Our work consists in an evaluation of the 1000

biggest Portuguese enterprises websites homepage.

This list of enterprises was achieved by the

Portuguese Institute of Statistics and the main

criteria was the business volume (INE, 2007).

3.1 Evaluation Proceedings

According to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative,

the accessibility evaluation of a website is a process

achieved by the following steps: definition of the

scope of the evaluation, definition of the evaluation

tools, definition of the proceedings for the manual

evaluation and definition of which reports will result

from the evaluation process (W3C, 2006b).

For the definition of the scope of the evaluation,

we had to identify the criteria to be used for the

accessibility evaluation and who would be part of

the target group. In order to achieve good results, we

decided to use the “AAA” accessibility level

announced by the W3C as the evaluation criteria

(W3C, 2008).

For the evaluation tool, we’ve chosen the

SortSite Tool (Sortsite, 2009). This was the chosen

web accessibility evaluation tool because, in first

place, it is referenced by W3C and secondly because

it is capable of automatically evaluate an entire

website against WCAG2.0, creating summary

reports that can be used to extract the evaluation

results.

Concerning the kind of reports that would result

from the evaluation process, we decided to do a

group of simple statistical studies (average, standard

deviation, maximum and minimum), that would

represent the reality of the web accessibility levels

presented by the Portuguese enterprises.

In this paper we present only the results of the

first page in each web site. Following this work, we

will proceed to the evaluation of 30 pages on each

web site.

3.2 Evaluation Target Group

For the definition of the target group we realized that

evaluating all the Portuguese enterprises websites

was extremely complicated, so as a way to solve this

issue we decided to evaluate, the 1000 largest

Portuguese enterprises (INE, 2007).

3.3 Evaluation Results

We started with a universe of the 1000 biggest

Portuguese enterprises, but only 777 (77,7%) where

evaluated, allowing us to compare this results with

the previous collected and discussed in the study

“Portuguese Web Accessibility” (Martins,

Gonçalves et all, 2009).

After the evaluation of the remaining 777

enterprises websites, we reached to a significant

group of results. However, following the line of

other Works (Martins, Gonçalves et all, 2009), we

believe that separating these results according to the

Portuguese Classification of the Enterprises

Activities (INE, 2008).

When we reached the separated evaluation

results (according to the previous defined criteria),

we also decided to group these same results

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according to the success criteria levels defined in the

W3C Web Contact Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.

With this in mind we reached the results that can be

perceived in table 1, 2 and 3.

As we can perceive by looking at table 1, the

dispersion of results is extremely intense, but it’s

possible to see that none of the evaluated websites

presents a zero count of level A errors. Another

aspect that we can also retrieve by looking at table 1,

it the maximum number of level A errors. By

looking at table 1 is also possible to perceive that,

the activity sectors E – Water and Residue

Treatment, A - Agriculture and I - Housing are the

most accessible in what the WCAG2.0 level A

criteria concerns. In opposite, the activity sector N –

Administrative Activities, J - Audiovisual and Q -

Health are the less accessible.

Table 1: Level A Evaluation Results.

Activity

Sector Avg Median

Standard

Deviation Max Min

Water &

Residue

2 1 3 15 0

Agriculture 4 1 7 38 0

Housing 8 3 15 73 0

Construction 9 2 34 600 0

Consulting 11 3 25 164 0

Transformation

Industries

12 2 34 947 0

Arts & Sports 13 4 26 137 0

Electricity,

Water and Gas

13 2 30 141 0

Auto

Commerce

14 3 39 608 0

Bank and

Ensurance

15 3 33 355 0

Real Estate 16 3 45 389 0

Transportation 17 3 44 288 0

Administrative

Activities

21 3 83 1358 0

Audiovisual 22 3 51 484 0

Health 29 4 78 432 0

Table 2: Level AA Evaluation Results.

Activity

Sector Avg Median

Standard

Deviation Max Min

Water and

Residue

3 1 3 15 0

Agriculture 5 2 12 81 0

Housing 13 4 28 162 0

Construction 14 3 48 751 0

Transformation

Industries

16 4 44 978 0

Consulting 17 4 38 223 0

Arts & Sports 21 5 44 221 0

Auto

Commerce

22 4 61 947 0

Real Estate 22 4 52 389 0

Bank and

Ensurance

25 4 57 431 0

Transportation 26 4 72 698 0

Administrative

Activities

30 4 109 1390 0

Electricity,

Water and Gas

30 4 74 388 0

Audiovisual 39 5 105 1162 0

Health 46 5 127 638 0

Table 3: Level AAA Evaluation Results.

Activity

Sector Avg Median

Standard

Deviation Max Min

Water and

Residue

4 2 4 15 0

Agriculture 6 2 12 81 0

Housing 14 7 27 162 0

Construction 16 4 48 751 0

Transformation

Industries

18 7 45 978 0

Consulting 19 7 38 223 0

Arts & Sports 23 8 43 220 0

Real Estate 24 8 52 389 0

Auto

Commerce

25 7 62 947 0

Bank and

Ensurance

27 8 57 431 0

Transportation 29 7 72 698 0

Electricity,

Water and Gas

32 8 74 388 0

Administrative

Activities

32 7 109 1390 0

Audiovisual 43 8 104 1162 0

Health 49 8 127 638 0

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225

By looking at table 2, we can see that, although

some activity sectors present a low error average, we

can see that there isn’t a single one that clearly

complies with the guidelines proposed by W3C. As

well as in table 1, also in table 2 we can perceive

that the maximum of errors is extremely high.

As we can perceive by analyzing table 3, the

results are in some way disperse, but it’s still

possible to retrieve some indicators, such as the high

average of errors and an extremely high maximum

of errors. These indicators clearly show that the

evaluated websites are not made according to the

W3C WCAG2.0 in what the level AAA criteria

concerns.

4 CONCLUSIONS

With this work we managed to achieve our initial

goal that was delivering indicators on the actual

accessibility levels presented by the Portuguese

enterprises websites.

As the results that were presented show, the

accessibility evaluation that was done, leaded to the

detection of a considerable number of errors on each

of the websites first page that belong to the target

group. This fact indicates that the accessibility levels

of the Portuguese enterprises are very low.

The World Wide Web is constantly evolving

and, alongside with this evolution, the citizens

requirements towards the services provided by the

Web (websites, web applications, etc.) are also

changing and evolving. In this way, it’s imperative

that all services available in the web should be

accessible. This same situation can be applied to the

Portuguese websites, so that the Portuguese disabled

citizens can use them and be less limited in our

society.

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