Banca de DEFESA: BÁRBARA FERNANDES DE OLIVEIRA CAVALCANTE

ACCESSIBILITY AND JOURNALISM: AN ANALYSIS OF TEN PORTALS BRAZILIAN NEWS AND THE ACCESS OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES TO YOUR CONTENTS

Accessibility; Communication; Journalism; Disabled people; WCAG.

When we talk about the internet, this democratic universe with multiples features, we should think about adapted and responsive content to make it easier for people with disabilities, dyslexia, non-literate, and more. However, it is possible to note that the country's mainstream news portals do not adopt mechanisms granting accessibility
features, meaning, due to lack of investments in assistive technologies, around 23% of the Brazilian population (sum of the blind and deaf people in the country) cannot access those webpages with the same on the same terms of a person without disabilities. This research aims to investigate the accessibility practices of ten mainstream news portals around the country, based on Brazilian Law Code 5,296/2004 and 13,146/2015, to understand what the failures of these portals are concerning accessibility, which the demands of people with visual and hearing impairments and how these issues could be solved. To achieve this, we selected two mainstream news portals from each Brazilian area and, based on automatic and manual evaluations of the Accessibility Guidelines for Web Content and, the application of an exclusive survey with people with disabilities. We compiled the information obtained and detected a significant flaw in communicational accessibility in the news portals and all Brazilian digital content.