Web accessibility problems on Latin American open access scientific journals

Abstract

Open access scientific journals allow scientific information to be published on the Web. Open access is immediate access, without registration, subscription or payment requirements to online digital material free of most of the restrictions imposed by traditional copyright. When talking about open access, it is often indicated that it is "barrier-free" access. However, the access barriers faced by people with disabilities often persist. Open access is access free of technical, legal or financial restrictions. Websites that provide open access must meet web accessibility standards in order to minimize the barriers that impede access to information for people with disabilities. However, web developers often do not have the knowledge to meet web accessibility standards. Several evaluation tools have been developed to verify that a website complies with web accessibility standards. In this article we present the results of an analysis of the web accessibility of 101 websites of scientific journals with open access in Latin America. EXaminator has been used as an automatic evaluation tool to detect the most important problems of web accessibility. The results show that most of the top page of the websites analyzed do not meet web accessibility standards. Finally, based on the results obtained, some recommendations are offered to help improve the accessibility of this type of websites.