ACCESSIBILITY AT SITES OF UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES BY THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED AND BLIND PEOPLE

Abstract

Study of accessibility at sites of Brazilian university libraries by the visually impaired and blind people. To perform the study it was carried on a bibliographic survey on web accessibility, within the scope of the national and international legislation, methods and approaches to test usability and accessibility and assistive technologies that help information access by people with special needs. It stresses the importance of building sites that are accessible to all people regardless of their physical conditions, including those with special needs, due to the facts that it is a basic right of all citizens. For the empirical search it was initially performed an accessibility test of websites from university libraries through an auto appraiser in order of analyzing the errors found by confronting them with the web accessibility guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Then, to meet the needs and barriers to the sites access from the university libraries faced by the blind and the visually impaired users, a usability and accessibility test was applied through the implementation of pre-defined tasks in the environment of the Instituto Benjamim Constant´s users. The results have allowed the identification of the difficulties faced by the blind users to access the web and, in this particular study, to access the sites from the Brazilian university libraries.