Middle Level Education Aims for Equity and Inclusion, but Do Our School Websites Meet ADA Compliance?

An often-overlooked component of a middle school website is the necessity for that website to be accessible to those with disabilities, while following the guidelines of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Workforce Rehabilitation Act. In support of the belief that support the belief that inclusive education and respect for diversity should be integrated throughout the school, this study investigated the accessibility of middle school websites in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio by selecting a random sample of 150 schools and analyzing their homepages using WAVE (Web Accessibility Versatile Evaluator), which reports accessibility violations by annotating a copy of the page that was evaluated and presenting embedded icons and indicators to disclose breaches with ADA. Out of 150 districts, 54% had errors that need immediate attention and all 150 schools had alerts of likely violations that ranged from alt-text omissions and empty or confusing links to issues with color contrast and keyboard-only navigation. The article proceeds to give practical suggestions for eliminating many of the errors, even for those shareholders with less than sophisticated technological expertise

Parliamentary online public engagement in the 21st Century : A comparative perspective with a focus on Austria and Portugal

This thesis concerns how parliaments, as institutions, utilise the Internet (and ICTs) to reach and engage citizen. It is structured around the concept of parliamentary (online) public engagement, which has only recently gained some attention in the research agendas of political science and legislative studies. This concept covers a very wide range of outlets and activities offered by parliaments, which can have different purposes and can assume both passive and active forms of engaging with citizens. This thesis focuses on a comparative study of PWs in 21 countries in Europe, and it is complemented by multiple case studies. A mixed method approach was applied, relying on both quantitative and qualitative data and methods. First, the measurement and description of parliamentary online public engagement activities and tools in 21 European parliaments was undergone. Then, it proceeded to a qualitative strand, first assessing the causal conditions necessary and/or sufficient for explaining the results from the quantitative strand and second studying in two case studies in depth – Portugal and Austria – in order to understand the relevant mechanisms, processes and critical actors behind parliaments’ online public engagement strategies over time. Empirically, the study finds that parliaments are selective in their strategies for engaging with the public. In their selectivity, most parliaments choose to invest largely in information provision, leaving other activities of public engagement as secondary. This means that most parliaments have not yet implemented activities and tools to truly engage with their citizens. Additionally, some of the examples found are of an experimental nature or are still in their infancy. Furthermore, parliaments still have a long way to go in pursuing the way they delivery public engagement activities to their audiences. Descriptive results also show that parliaments are cautious when it comes to citizen’s actual participation in the policymaking and prefer to convert conventional forms of participation to digital versions instead of creating innovative democratic instruments. From the explanatory analysis it was possible to conclude that besides parliamentary resources, a committed leadership and political will from key critical actors are also important when it comes to changing the way parliaments engage with citizens through digital media. Additionally, these institutions are mimicking other parliaments that are perceived as successful in using ICTs to communicate and engage with citizens as a response to environmental uncertainty. Finally, it seems that inter-parliamentary cooperation, i.e. learning mechanisms, are increasingly relevant for parliaments on these matters

Portugal: Leapfrogging Digital Transformation

This report is structured as follow: Section 1 presents details about Portugal enabling or inhibiting its digital transformation. Section 2 analyzes the main motivations for the digital transformation strategy; Section 3 summarizes its main challenges, while Section 4 presents the main components of the strategy. Section 5 analyzes the governance model, and Section 6, the legal and regulatory framework. Section 7 discusses critical enablers for the digital transformation of government services. Section 8 introduces 16 key initiatives of the strategy. Section 9 summarizes the lessons learnt, followed by an assessment of the strategy’s impact in Section 10. Section 11 synthesizes lessons for Latin American countries. Finally, Appendix A enumerates main legal and regulatory instruments supporting the digital transformation in Portugal, Appendix B presents a set of 18 sections providing details of the initiatives analyzed in the report1, and Appendix C explains how the digital transformation efforts contributed to face the challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemics.Fil: Estevez, Elsa Clara. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Fillottrani, Pablo. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur; ArgentinaFil: Linares, Sebastián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Economía. Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur; ArgentinaFil: Cledou, Maria Guillermina. Universidade do Minho; Portuga

Mexican World Heritage information on the web: Institutional presence and visibility

This study offers a global overview of the presence and visibility of web information on UNESCO World Heritage located in Mexico, via the analysis of official websites and Web 2.0 information. Cultural heritage is a determining factor in linking people to their history, and contributes to increasing cultural tourism and economic development. The study starts from the hypothesis that the design of these has an influence on the dissemination and popularity of the aforementioned heritage. The relationships between the administrative organization of the country and Internet protocols are compared. A webometric study of the official Mexican websites was carried out. An evaluation sheet was designed to allow the assessment of aspects relating to identification, presence, accessibility and content. The multilingual nature of this information and its presence on social networks and Wikipedia was analysed. The analysis of URLs confirms that the domain .mx is used in 84% of cases. The results indicate a noticeable use of Web 2.0 dissemination of the heritage assets on YouTube (51%) and Facebook (40%), followed by 23% on Twitter. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines are not yet frequently applied. Finally, the results obtained make it possible to identify variables that can contribute to improvements in the visibility and dissemination of official web information.This paper was supported by the RD & I Project, HAR2012-38562 (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness)

Empirical Studies on Web Accessibility of Educational Websites: A Systematic Literature Review

Web accessibility means that people with some type of disability can make use of the Web in the same conditions as the rest of the people. When we talk about web accessibility, we refer to a web design and development that allows these people to perceive, understand, navigate and interact with the Web. Web accessibility also benefits other people, including elderly people whose abilities have declined as a result of age. The Web is an essential resource in human activity: education, employment, government, commerce, health, entertainment and many others benefit of the power of the Web. The aim of this systematic literature review is to analyze the empirical methods of evaluating accessibility to educational websites, disabilities and their errors described in a total of 25 selected studies. The results show that in 20 of the 25 papers, web accessibility was evaluated with automatic tools, in 2 papers it was evaluated with real users and in the other 3 papers with automatic tools, real users and experts. There is also evidence that all the educational websites analyzed in the papers need to correct errors. In conclusion, educational websites do not meet any version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and their conformance levels. According to the results, the empirical evaluation methods used for web accessibility could be improved by adopting automatic evaluation tools for website construction and manual mechanisms with web accessibility experts. The challenge for educational institutions is to carry out web accessibility projects to comply with WCAG and other web accessibility standards and current laws of educational inclusion.This work was supported in part by the Catholic University of Cuenca and in part by the EduTech Project co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union under Grant 609785-EPP-1-2019-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP

AccessBot – Assisted Assessment of Web Accessibility

Tese de mestrado, Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2020Nowadays, the World Wide Web is a necessity, and its content should be available to everyone. People with different types of disabilities have different needs in using the web and access the content. Developers should fulfill these needs by making websites accessible. Alongside this premise, worldwide government directives oblige public and private sector websites and apps to meet accessibility requirements. To achieve a determined level of accessibility conformance, developers should follow the WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and use automatic testing tools to evaluate their websites. However, while creating an accessible website, they may find difficulties that make this a laborious process. After studying and comparing eight of the most well-known accessibility evaluation extensions for the Chrome web browser, I found that these difficulties arise from various factors. These are subjective guidelines interpretations and implementations, automatic testing tools that provide limited coverage of the success criteria, different results displayed for the same website, and some guidelines are not tested automatically, meaning developers should perform manual testing. After analyzing these results, this project, with the name AccessBot, tries to cover the automatic accessibility evaluation gaps. It is an assisted validation tool using the open-source QualWeb accessibility evaluation. AccessBot is a browser extension for Chrome. Being a chrome extension makes it easy to access, install, and use by developers and more accessible to the general public. Its implementation aims to help users by visually identifying the problem, and performing a step-by-step guided evaluation, complementing the automatic evaluation done by QualWeb. The accessibility testing considers the test rules developed by the ACT-Rules Community, which makes an effort to create detailed descriptions of WCAG

Accessibility and quality of drug company disclosures of payments to healthcare professionals and organisations in 37 countries: A European policy review

Objectives: To examine the accessibility and quality of drug company payment data in Europe.Design: Comparative policy review of payment data in countries with different regulatory approaches to disclosure.Setting; 37 European countries.Participants: European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, its trade group and their drug company members; eurosfordocs.eu, an independent database integrating payments disclosed by companies and trade groups; regulatory bodies overseeing payment disclosure.Main outcome measures: Regulatory approaches to disclosure (self-regulation, public regulation, combination of the two); data accessibility (format, structure, searchability, customisable summary statistics, downloadability) and quality (spectrum of disclosed characteristics, payment aggregation, inclusion of taxes, recipient or donor identifiers).Results: Of 30 countries with self-regulation, five had centralised databases, with Disclosure UK displaying the highest accessibility and quality. In 23 of the remaining countries with self-regulation and available data, disclosures were published in the portable document format (PDF) on individual company websites, preventing the public from understanding payment patterns. Eurosfordocs.eu had greater accessibility than any industry-run database, but the match between the value of payments integrated in eurosfordocs.eu and summarised separately by industry in seven countries ranged between 56% and 100% depending on country. Eurosfordocs.eu shared quality shortcomings with the underlying industry data, including ambiguities in identifying payments and their recipients. Public regulation was found in 15 countries, used either alone (3), in combination (4) or in parallel with (8) self-regulation. Of these countries, 13 established centralised databases with widely ranging accessibility and quality, and sharing some shortcomings with the industry-run databases. The French database, Transparence Santé, had the highest accessibility and quality, exceeding that of Disclosure UK.Conclusions: The accessibility and quality of payment data disclosed in European countries are typically low, hindering investigation of financial conflicts of interest. Some improvements are straightforward but reaching the standards characterising the widely researched US Open Payments database requires major regulatory change

A business plan for a new mobile application to the consumer foodservice industry

The Portuguese consumer foodservice industry is experiencing a boost in technology adoption, driven by significant changes in consumer behavior and business dynamics, due to mobile increasing penetration. Accordingly, the present work project consists on developing a business plan for meeting an identified opportunity in the technological foodservice landscape. Therefore, this report is divided into three sections, each of which addressing different objectives: (A) External Environment, providing key external insights that support the opportunity; (B) Strategy Formulation, establishing a strategic direction; and (C) Action Plan, determining an implementation plan for starting the busines

Hybrid vs Traditional models on customer experience : an application to the Portuguese Real Estate Market

Technology is impacting industries all over the world and the real estate industry is no exception. This thesis aims to analyze the traditional model of real estate and the new emerging methods where several tasks are performed online (reducing the human contact) and understand the current customer experience with the goal to understand how technology can improve it. Several research methods were used to obtain data. In terms of qualitative search, a focus group was conducted to people who already interacted with the market and 3 in-depth interviews were performed to Millennials with no experience in the real estate industry. The quantitative data was gathered through a survey conveyed to 468 valid participants. Both searches were reinforced by literature on the real estate market, the impact of technology in the industry, customer experience, brand equity and a description of the two generations under study: Millennials and Generation X. The key findings suggest that the overall satisfaction with the mediation process regarding quickness, smoothness and the method chosen is between average and great. There is a considerable number of participants that do not perceive the need for a mediator. There is a limited knowledge of the market. The preferences in the market are not aligned as there are significant differences between sellers and buyers and between generations. To conclude, for Millennials, a hybrid model provides a better customer experience while for Generation X, a traditional model is the one with a superior level on experience.A tecnologia está a ter um forte impacto nas indústrias por todo o mundo e o mercado imobiliário não é exceção. Esta tese tem como propósito analisar o modelo imobiliário tradicional e os novos métodos onde vários passos são feitos online (reduzindo assim o contacto humano) e ainda perceber como é a experiência do consumidor e de que forma a tecnologia pode melhorá-la. Foram usados vários métodos para obter dados. Relativamente à pesquisa qualitativa, foi realizado um “focus group” com pessoas que já interagiram no mercado e ainda 3 entrevistas foram feitas a membros da geração Y que ainda não tiveram qualquer contacto com a indústria. A pesquisa quantitativa foi recolhida através de um questionário online com um total de 468 respostas. Ambas as pesquisas foram reforçadas através de literatura relativa ao mercado imobiliário, o impacto da tecnologia nesta indústria, experiência do consumir, equidade da marca e uma descrição das gerações X e Y. As principais conclusões sugerem que, em geral, a satisfação com o processo de mediação em termos de rapidez, tranquilidade e método escolhido para fazer a transação é entre média a excelente. Há ainda um número considerável de participantes que não vê qualquer valor acrescentado na mediação. Há um conhecimento limitado do mercado. As preferências no Mercado não estão alinhadas dado que há diferenças significativas entre vendedores e compradores e entre gerações. Para concluir, a geração Y tem uma melhor experiência num modelo híbrido enquanto que a geração X tem uma melhor experiência no modelo tradicional