Digital Libraries

Comparison of Web Accessibility in Technological Open-Access Journals from Latin America

María Hallo, Sergio Luján-Mora, Francisco Hallo. 6th International Conference The Future of Education (FOE 2016), p. 344-349, Florence (Italy), June 30 - July 1 2016. ISBN: 978-88-6292-743-7. ISSN: 2384-9509.


Abstract

Open-access journals (OAJs) collect preserve and publish scientific information, on digital form, related to a particular subject. Different kinds of topics are researched and published among them technological subjects. The access to the technological studies is important to the people with disabilities to find studies related to their needs and work. The Web is used to disseminate the information on websites from OAJs. However, the Web non accessible is often a barrier to access the information by some groups of users with disabilities limiting their opportunities in education. To support the accessibility of web sites, different accessibility guidelines and standards have been introduced. Unfortunately, web developers often lack sufficient knowledge to meet these guidelines. To assure and certify the fulfillment of web accessibility guidelines, various automatic accessibility evaluation tools have been developed. In this paper, a comparative study of the web accessibility of official websites from 125 Technological Open-Access journals (TOAJ) from Latin American countries is presented. Two automatic evaluation tools have been used to perform the comparison: TAW and eXaminator. The results show that most of the websites are not developed according to the web accessibility standards for persons with disabilities. Besides, we have developed recommendations for improving the accessibility of these websites for people with disabilities.

Keywords: Open-access journal, OAJ, web accessibility, Latin America

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