Assessment of Web Content Accessibility Levels in Spanish Official Online Education Environments

Diversity-based designing, or the goal of ensuring that web-based information is accessible to as many diverse users as possible, has received growing international acceptance in recent years, with many countries introducing legislation to enforce it. This paper analyses web content accessibility levels in Spanish education portals according to the international guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Additionally, it suggests the calculation of an inaccessibility rate as a tool for measuring the degree of non-compliance with WAI Guidelines 2.0 as well as illustrating the significant gap that separates people with disabilities from digital education environments (with a 7.77% average). A total of twenty-one educational web portals with two different web depth levels (42 sampling units) were assessed for this purpose using the automated analysis tool Web Accessibility Test 2.0 (TAW, for its initials in Spanish). The present study reveals a general trend towards non-compliance with the technical accessibility recommendations issued by the W3C-WAI group (97.62% of the websites examined present mistakes in Level A conformance). Furthermore, despite the increasingly high number of legal and regulatory measures about accessibility, their practical application still remains unsatisfactory. A greater level of involvement must be assumed in order to raise awareness and enhance training efforts towards accessibility in the context of collective Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), since this represents not only a necessity but also an ethical, social, political and legal commitment to be assumed by society.

When Spanish owns English words

The English language and the Internet, both separately and taken together, are nowadays well-acknowledged as powerful forces which influence and affect the lexico-grammatical characteristics of other languages world-wide. In fact, many authors like Crystal (2004) have pointed out the emergence of the so-called Netspeak, that is, the language used in the Net or World Wide Web; as Crystal himself (2004: 19) puts it, ‘a type of language displaying features that are unique to the Internet […] arising out of its character as a medium which is electronic, global and interactive’. This ‘language’, however, may be differently understood: either as an adaptation of the English language proper to internet requirements and purposes, or as a new and rapidly-changing and developing language as a result of a rapid evolution or adaptation to Internet requirements of almost all world languages, for whom English is a trendsetter. If the second and probably most plausible interpretation is adopted, there are three salient features of ‘Netspeak’: (a) the rapid expansion of all its new linguistic developments thanks to the Internet itself, which may lead to the generalization and widespread acceptance of new words, coinages, or meanings, hundreds of times faster than was the case with the printed media. As said above, (b) the visible influence of English, the most prevalent language on the Internet. Consequently, (c) this new language tends to reduce the ‘distance’ between English and other languages as well as the ignorance of the former by speakers of other languages, since the ‘Netspeak’ version of the latter adopts grammatical, syntactic and lexical features of English. Thus, linguistic differences may even disappear when code-switching and/or borrowing occurs, as whole fragments of English appear in other language contexts. As a consequence of the new situation, an ideal context appears for interlanguage or multilingual word formation to thrive: puns, blends, compounds and word creativity in general find in the web the ideal place to gain rapid acceptance world-wide, as a result of fashion, coincidence, or sheer merit of the new linguistic proposals.

Estudios sobre la prensa digital iberoamericana

Cuando en 1994/95 la World Wide Web dejó el mero ambiente académico para abrirse a todos, la prensa fue uno de los primeros sectores en adoptar esta tecnología aunque, hasta el día de doy, sigue buscando la mejor forma de hacerlo y de superar las dificultades financieras que esta nueva vía de difusión de noticias trajo consigo. Los diarios han debido adaptarse tanto a un nuevo formato (las páginas web y su “multimedialidad”) como a un nuevo ritmo de difusión, antes más bien propio de la radio, y al surgimiento de sistemas complementarios -a veces competidores- como las redes sociales. En la presente obra, hemos reunido varios trabajos que abordan distintos aspectos de la problemática actual, sin pretender en absoluto abarcarlos todos ni asegurar que abordamos los más importantes, ya que el contenido reunido ha dependido en gran parte de las respuestas al Call for papers de Revista Mediterránea de Comunicación.