Portugal was the first Member State from European Union to adopt accessibility guidelines to Public Administration websites: the WCAG 1.0 in August 1999. Since February 2013 that the WCAG 2.0 make also part of the National Regulation of Digital Interoperability (RNID) used by Public Administration and also apllied to all State business sector.
All the work carried out since 1999 made Web accessibility to become a quality requirement of the digital content and services online, mainly in the Portuguese Public Administration. National studies show that an accessibility significant improvement happened between 2006 and 2008 and that was consolidated in 2010: we passed from 25% compliance of the Web sites of Central Public Administration in 2006 to 75% compliance in 2010 (level A of WCAG 1.0). The UN study [1] published in February 2011 put Portugal in the 2nd position among 192 analysed countries concerning Web accessibility best practices.
Beside advisory services and training sessions, Portugal has focused in monitoring systems. Comprehensive reporting of practices, with precise identification of the problem, emphasizing the possible solutions and pointing the resource material to find the better way to avoid the accessibility barriers. More than searching for errors, the tools that Portugal has developed aim to distinguish the good and the bad practices. More than penalizing, it is important to make a pedagogical approach to teaching / learning.
The presentation aims to show and discuss some of the assumptions of AccessMonitor and use of it to create a Web Accessibility Observatory as a tool of awareness to drive the accessibility of web content.
