Avaliação automática de acessibilidade de material didático de cursos técnicos de informática

Abstract

Digital teaching materials need to be accessible to enable students with disabilities to fully and effectively participate in distance learning. This paper reports the study of a case of automatic accessibility evaluation and correction of problems found in the teaching material of Information Technology (IT) courses, offered by the Instituto Metrópole Digital of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. Four IT professionals, without knowledge and experience of accessible web programming, used the automatic evaluator HTML Code Sniffer to evaluate the digital teaching materials of 6 subjects. In 899 pages of content, 774 accessibility errors were found, with an average of 0.83 problem per page. Almost all accessibility issues found were fixed, except for those that depended on content change by teachers. Between June and December 2021, this initiative consumed approximately 386 hours or 2.5 months of work by one person. It became evident that the production of digital teaching materials needs specific care for accessibility and that an automatic evaluator can help IT professionals to start approaching accessibility in web programming.