The Future of Education

Open access journals (OAJs) collect, preserve and publish scientific information on digital form related to a particular subject. Different kinds of topics are researched and published such as technological subjects. The access to the technological studies is important to the people with disabilities to find studies related to their needs and work.

The World Wide Web (the Web) is used to disseminate the information on websites from OAJs.

However, the Web is often a barrier to access the information on some groups of disabled users limiting their opportunities in education. To support the accessibility of web sites, different accessibility guidelines and standards have been introduced. Unfortunately, web developers often lack sufficient knowledge to meet these guidelines. To assure and certify the fulfillment of web accessibility guidelines, various automatic accessibility evaluation tools have been developed. In this paper, a comparative study of the web accessibility of official websites from 125 technological Open Access journals from Latin American countries is presented. Two automatic evaluation tools have been used to perform the comparison: TAW and eXaminator. The results show that most of the websites are not developed according to the accessibility standards for disabled persons. Therefore, we have developed recommendations for improving the accessibility of these websites for people with disabilities.