Abstract:

Web accessibility means that people with some type of disability can make use of the Web in the same conditions as the rest of the people. When talking about web accessibility, we are referring to a web design that allows these people to perceive, understand, navigate and interact with the Web. Web accessibility also benefits other people, including elderly people whose abilities have declined as a result of age. Information and Communication Technologies have allowed people with disabilities to access information that they could not before. Thus, access to electronic or digital information is an inclusive mechanism in the information society.

Ecuador, like other countries, has adopted the ISO/IEC 40500: 2012 standard. To follow up on compliance in Ecuador, the Ecuadorian Standardization Institute has created the Ecuadorian technical regulation RTE INEN 288 "Accessibility for web content" that entered into force on August 8, 2016. This regulation applies to the contents published on public and private sector websites that provide public services. In its first transitory provision, until August 8, 2018, all Ecuadorian web sites that provide a public service must be accessible with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 with a level of conformance A. When talking about web content, reference is also made to the electronic documents loaded in the web portals for download. Therefore, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents published on the web must be accessible, so that anyone can interact and understand their content using assistive technologies. According to the deadline established in the first transitory, Ecuadorian websites must have complied with the standard of accessibility WCAG 2.0 level A at present. In addition, up to now the regulations in Ecuador have not been updated but it is possible that they do so in the future with the WCAG 2.1.

Despite the importance of accessibility in the documents published on the web, its compliance in the web portals of educational institutions is limited in Ecuador. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the accessibility of documents published on the web portals of educational institutions, identify their accessibility errors, propose accessibility guides and disseminate them. To this end, we seek answers to the following questions: What documents published on the web portals of educational institutions comply with the rules on web accessibility? and What are the accessibility errors in the documents uploaded to the educational web portals? The purpose of this investigation is to verify if the entry into force of the Ecuadorian technical regulation have contributed to improve the accessibility of the documents published in the educational web portals.

For the selection of web portals, we use the information from the master file of educational institutions of the Ministry of Education of Ecuador. With this information, it was possible to determine the web portals of the educational institutions of according to the domain name .edu.ec. Then, we carry out an exhaustive search of the documents published on their web portals. Then, this document presents an analysis of accessibility of electronic documents in Ecuador, using Adobe Acrobat XI Pro and the accessibility checker of Microsoft Office 2016. After having evaluated the documents published on the web portals, we created and disseminated the accessibility guides through a teacher training.

Keywords:

Electronic documents, Disability, Web accessibility, Web portals, WCAG 2.0.