PORTUGUESE WEB ACCESSIBILITY

Portuguese Enterprises Websites Accessibility Evaluation

José Martins, José Cruz and Ramiro Gonçalves

UTAD University, Vila Real, Portugal

Keywords: Accessibility, W3C, Guidelines, Integration, Disability, Society.

Abstract: The use of the web is quickly spreading to the majority of the society. In many countries the use of the web

in government services, education and training, commerce, news, citizenship, health and entertainment is

significantly increasing. The web is extremely important for the dissemination of information and the

interaction between the various 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 in their interaction with the society. With this in mind, an evaluation of the accessibility levels of

the Portuguese websites is, essential, for an assumption on the availability of these websites to all disabled

citizens.

1 INTRODUCTION

The content of this document is the result of research

and work done under a research project, whose

theme was the evaluation on the accessibility of the

Portuguese enterprises websites.

The introduction of new Technologies and

methods for, treatment and utilization of information

makes, our society, more complete and fit for

evolution. This evolution will create better life

conditions and best professional performances.

The development of the information and

communication Technologies - ICT in the last two

decades of the twentieth century and, their mass

availability within the population, lead to a profound

change in the economical and social activities. These

changes had, and still have, an impact in the citizens

quality of life, competitiveness and productivity of

enterprises (Socrates 2007b).

The information society is a society for all. The

ICT bring a clear and important influence, in the

various domains of the new way of life in society. Its

applications cover the entire spectrum of social

groups. Never the less, there are barriers to

overcome, opportunities to explore and benefits to

be collected. Therefore it’s not correct to create a

brand new group of e-excluded people, just by

abandoning the unprotected. It’s extremely

important to promote the universal access to e-

literacy and e-competence (Gurstein 2000).

The growing need of access to the online

information impels for a warranty of accessibility to

this same web content. According to the 2001

communication of the European Commission (EU

2002a), there are 37 million disabled European

citizens who need to be granted, a full access to web

content.

The ICT offer great potential to citizens with

mental and physical disabilities. Through the use of

these technologies, they can be better integrated in

their societies. It is however necessary, to increase

efforts to adapt the technology to certain groups of

people with disabilities (Wenner 2008).

2 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 disabilities, such as visual impairment, hearing

problems, and physical, cognitive or neurological

limitations. In this set, also should be included

conditions of temporary incapacity, such as the loss

142

Martins J., Cruz J. and Gonçalves R. (2009).

PORTUGUESE WEB ACCESSIBILITY - Portuguese Enterprises Websites Accessibility Evaluation.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Human-Computer Interaction, pages 142-147

DOI: 10.5220/0002157301420147

 SciTePress

of glasses or the breaking of an arm. Beyond this,

accessibility also makes the products more

accessible to people who do not have any kind of

disability (W3C 2008c).

According to the European Commission, ICT are

a powerful engine for employment and growth. A

quarter of the GDP of the European Union and 40%

of the productivity growth is due to the ICT. These

facts show the importance of proactive policies to

react to the deep technological changes (EU 2002b).

Jim Thatcher and Shawn Henry claim that the

web accessibility goal consists in, providing to all

the disabled citizens, the ability to perceive,

understand, navigate and interact with the Web, even

if they have visual, hearing, physical, cognitive,

speech or neurological impairment (Thatcher,

Henry et al. 2006).

2.1 Web Accessibility – World

Perspective and Regulation

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).

The World Health Organization – WHO claims

that about 10% of the world population suffers, from

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).

The first time web accessibility was matter of

business, in the European Union, was in September

2001, through a communication made by the

European Commission. This communication was the

result of the analysis made to the “eEurope 2002”

action-plan, that was approved in the Feira’s

European Council (EU 2002b). After 2001, and has

the web accessibility importance was growing, the

European Commission launched the “eEurope 2005”

action-plan. This plan goal was the creation of

modern public websites and the creation of a

dynamic environment for e-business. According to

the same action-plan, the referred creations would be

made with the help of an enormous amount of

broadband access offers, with competitive prices and

through a secure info structure for information (EU

2003).

Web content accessibility has been order of

business to various world entities, such as the W3C

consortium that, in the year of 1999, created the

World Accessibility Initiative – WAI. This initiative

was created aiming to be a parallel organization to

the W3C. Its mission should be developing

guidelines (that would be understood has the

international standards for web accessibility),

developing support materials for a better

understanding of the web, developing web

accessibility and developing new resources, through

international cooperation (W3C 2008a).

Since the year 1999, WAI has been aiming for

the increase of web content accessibility, by creating

several tools that allow it. An example of these tools

is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These

guidelines are an explicative document of how to

create web content, so that it can be accessed by just

anyone, including those who have some sort of

disability. According to these same guidelines, web

content is all the information within a web page or

web application. These accessibility guidelines are

characterized by tree main aspects, the guidelines

checkpoints, the priority levels (level 1, level 2 and

level 3) and the conformance levels (level A, level

AA and level AAA) (W3C 2008c).

The world awareness, for the web content

accessibility issue, is growing every day. This same

awareness is globally penetrating the enterprise

markets. This has been happening because, disabled

people are using ICT in a more regular basis, and

their economical influence is also growing. As a

consequence of this global “movements”, the

Portuguese enterprise market should also adapt itself

to this new reality.

2.2 The Importance of Accessible ICT

The ICT allow speeding up the pace of technical

progress, modernization and economical structural

adjustment. Since ICT stimulate, in a large extent,

the competitiveness, the European Union must take

every opportunity offered by them (EU 2005).

The ICT currently have a very high penetration

rate in the Portuguese enterprise market. The

Agency for the Society of Knowledge confirms this

statement in the analysis made to the Portuguese

National Institute of Statistics inquiry, according to

witch 95% of the enterprises, with ten or more

employees, are computer users, and 84% of these

PORTUGUESE WEB ACCESSIBILITY - Portuguese Enterprises Websites Accessibility Evaluation

143

same enterprises use e-mail and 83% have internet

access. For medium-size enterprises (50 to 249

employees) these three indicators have the value of

99%. For big enterprises (250 or more employees)

the three indicators all have a value of 100% (INE

2007).

Currently in Portugal, there are about 400000

employees in enterprises directly related to the ICT.

This value, according to the claims of the Agency

for the Society of Knowledge, will increase about

3%. Other value that, according to this same

Agency, will also increase in the future, is the

number of people working with a computer in their

place of work, that will increase from 19% (in the

year of 2004) to around 40% (UMIC 2007).

Due to this, it’s very important to have accessible

ICT so that, all of the people that work or that will

work with them, have the means to really take the

best advantage of these technologies.

The World Wide Consortium is currently present

in the World regulation of web accessibility. The

W3C 1.0 version of the accessibility guidelines is

currently, the standard used for the creation of rules

that encourage, the creation of accessible Web

content. Although the widely acceptance of the

directives of the W3C as the standard to use, this

same consortium is developing a second version of

guidelines for accessibility, in order to define a new

set of criteria and techniques, appropriately adjusted

for the current technological levels. According to the

recommendation of the W3C, the 2.0 version of the

directives for accessibility cover a large number of

recommendations to make Web content more

accessible. Following these guidelines will make

web content accessible to a larger number of people

with disabilities (including blindness or low vision,

deafness or hearing loss, learning disabilities,

cognitive limitations, restrictions of movement,

difficulties in speech, photosensitivity and

combinations of these). Following this new set of

directives, the final result will be a Web content

more accessible to all user (W3C 2008b).

3 WEB ACCESSIBILITY

EVALUATION

3.1 Web Accessibility Evaluation

Proceedings

For undertaking the evaluation of the accessibility

levels presented by the Portuguese enterprises

websites, we chosen to use the method proposed by

the W3C’s WAI.

In what the WAI concerns, the accessibility

evaluation of a website is a process made by the

following steps: definition of the evaluation scope,

definition of the evaluation tools, definition of the

proceedings for the manual evaluation and definition

of witch reports will result from the evaluation

process (W3C 2006).

For the definition of the evaluation scope, we

had to choose what criteria would the accessibility

evaluation follow and who would be part of the

target group. For the criteria to use, we decided that

the best way to achieve good results was, following

the “AAA” accessibility level announced by the

W3C (W3C 2008b).

For the definition of the target group we realised

the impossibility in evaluating all of the Portuguese

enterprises, so we decided to evaluate the 1000

biggest Portuguese enterprises during the year of

2005 (INE 2007). Even though this was our initial

target group, after a research on the websites of

these enterprises, we reached to the conclusion that

only 777 of them had online websites and 223 of

them didn’t had an available website or had one that

was “in construction” or one that was incompatible

with the evaluation tool we’ve chosen. For this

reason the “final” target group was only composed

by 777 of the initial 1000 enterprises.

For the evaluation tool to use, we’ve chosen the

TAW3 tool (CTIC 2008).

This was the chosen web accessibility evaluation

tool because its execution is done according to the

following points:

• The evaluation is based on the W3C Web

Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0;

• It’s free to use by anyone;

• It automatically evaluates all the pages of

a website;

• It creates a report with all the accessibility

failures encountered in a website.

• It’s available in several languages,

including Portuguese and English.

For this project we decided that the manual

evaluation, of entire target group was something that

we wouldn’t be able to achieve in the period of time

that we had, for the resolution of this project. As a

result of this situation we decided not to manually

evaluate the referred websites.

In what concerns 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

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would represent the reality of the web accessibility

levels presented by the Portuguese enterprises.

3.2 Evaluation Results

The first analysis made was pointed to the target

group. This initial process consisted in verifying the

number of Portuguese enterprises that had an

available website. The result of this process was that

82.8% of the initial 1000 enterprises had an

available website has the figure 1 shows.

Figure 1: Relationship between the enterprises with an

available website and the ones with an unavailable

website.

After this initial process, the available websites

were tested against the W3C/WAI accessibility

guidelines with the help of the TAW3 tool. The first

element that was retrieved from this evaluation was

the fact that, 6% of the initial 82.8% couldn’t be

evaluated do to their incompatibilities with the tool

that was chosen.

Other information that was possible to retrieve

from this first analysis was, the discrepancy of the

results obtained with the accessibility evaluation.

The figure 2 shows this discrepancy.

Figure 2: Discrepancy of the accessibility evaluation

results.

Even though the objective of this evaluation was,

achieving indicators of the web accessibility levels

within, the Portuguese enterprises websites, it was

imperative that the results that supported those

indicators were correct and thrust wordy. Due to

this, a statistic treatment had to be done to the

evaluation results. The initial treatment consisted in

applying the outlier definition to the referred results

(Mendenhall and Sincich 1995; Renze 2005). The

figure 3 presents a schema of what method was

applied to the results in this statistical treatment

stage.

Figure 3: Outliers treatment schema.

After the referred statistical treatment to the

evaluation results another analysis to its values was

made. This step allowed to perceive that, although

they were already indicators of a tendency on the

accessibility levels presented by the Portuguese

enterprises websites, these values were still quite

widespread as can be viewed in table 1.

Table 1: Target group accessibility evaluation results.

Priority 1 Priority 2 Priority 3

Average

180 1375 212

Standard

deviation

215 1352 200

Median

149 1321 225

Minimum

0 0 0

Maximum

12612 35645 4831

These results indicate that almost all websites

have accessibility issues. Giving the fact that priority

1 errors are those that, according to the W3C-WAI

initiative, are those that cannot exist in a website, an

average of 180 priority 1 errors for website, is a

simple indicator of a possible lack of accessibility in

these websites. The high number of the priority 2

error average indicates that, the evaluated websites

also have priority 2 accessibility issues. This same

situation is also true for the priority 3 errors.

Even though these results can provide a

simplistic evidence for the existence of accessibility

issues in the Portuguese enterprises websites, it was

decided to an even more specialized analysis over

PORTUGUESE WEB ACCESSIBILITY - Portuguese Enterprises Websites Accessibility Evaluation

145

these same results. This analysis started with the

division of the target group according to the

enterprises activity sector. For supporting this

division was used the 3rd revision of the Portuguese

Economical Activity Classification (Socrates

2007a).

After this division was completed, the results

were grouped by the W3C Accessibility Guidelines

priority levels. This grouping can be observed in the

tables 2, 3 and 4, where the average, minimum and

maximum values are presented, along side with the

number of websites evaluated in each activity sector.

Table 2: Priority 1 accessibility evaluation results grouped

by the activity sector.

Activity Sector Avg. Min. Max. #

Agriculture

895

Housing

382

Construction

4444

Transformation

Industries

118

12612

217

Real Estate

136

3568

Transportation

137

4951

Electricity,

Water and Gas

144

1205

Auto Commerce

180

4780

261

Bank and

Insurance

197

2941

Administration

Activities

340

8817

Audiovisual

406

1900

Consulting

546

1535

Health

1385

5909

Table 3: Priority 2 accessibility evaluation results grouped

by the activity sector.

Activity Sector Avg. Min Max. #

Agriculture

223

2364 5

Housing

672 0 3490 6

Construction

812 0 16028

Real Estate

1031 592 9139 7

Transformation

Industries

1185 1 35645 217

Transportation

1360 5 10787 50

Auto Commerce

1370 2 18765 261

Bank and

Insurance

1815 33 18584 35

Electricity,

Water and Gas

1843 105 9541 12

Consulting

1965 11 9520 34

Audiovisual

2414 11 16058 30

Administration

Activities

3124 4 9523 16

Health

5634 92 20806 21

Table 4: Priority 3 accessibility evaluation results grouped

by the activity sector.

Activity Sector Avg. Min Max. #

Agriculture

115 0 308 5

Housing

126 0 532 6

Construction

141 0 1700 74

Real Estate

157 53 2063 7

Transformation

Industries

191 0 3542 217

Transportation

195 1 1997 50

Auto Commerce

205 0 4310 261

Bank and

Insurance

226 8 2164 35

Electricity,

Water and Gas

274 16 1306 12

Consulting

388 0 2369 30

Audiovisual

402 2 4831 34

Administration

Activities

469 5 1327 16

Health

951 39 3678 21

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 that belong to the target group. This

fact indicates that the accessibility levels of the

Portuguese enterprises are very low.

Another aspect that resulted from this work was

the unveiling of the number of websites that could

be evaluated. From the initial 1000 Portuguese

enterprises with the biggest business volume, only

777 of them could be evaluated. This difference had

its origin in the fact that almost 200 of the initial

1000 enterprises didn’t have a website and in the

fact that the remaining ones didn’t have a TAW3

compatible website.

The World Wide Web is constantly evolving

and, alongside with this evolution, the citizen’s

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 are 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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146

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