Who watches the watchers? Accessibility of the public prosecutor's office websites in Brazil and implications for e-government accessibility surveillance policies

Abstract

Ensuring accessibility to governmental services is an essential issue to disabled people, especially to services such as the public prosecutor's office, in charge of surveillance of other governmental entities. This study investigated whether public prosecutors' websites are following web accessibility guidelines. The authors evaluated the websites of each of the 27 states of Brazil using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. The results indicated that the websites violated between 16 and 33 different success criteria out of 61 criteria. The results can help the agencies improve their accessibility and show the need to build the capability to perform technical analysis of the adherence to accessibility guidelines of governmental and private websites bounded by Brazilian legislation. By enhancing surveillance, e-government services could reach better accessibility levels and increase awareness about legal requirements.