Are the university websites accessible?: A check based on the principles of W3C

Abstract

Today, the Web is considered an important resource for work, entertainment, services and communication. It is a fact that has become indispensable nowadays. Although the advancement of recent years has made the Web more popular, not all potential users have easy use of the sites available. In this group are the visually impaired. Visually impaired users still face many difficulties in using the services available on the web. In this sense, it is important to evaluate the accessibility of the websites and to verify how much is still necessary to increase the accessibility level of the websites. In this work, an automated evaluation of Universities websites was performed to verify how accessible these websites are. The assessment was based on W3C recommendations. The results point to a need to know and comply more with accessibility standards, so that visually impaired users can better understand the websites available.