People with disabilities suffer from lack of accessibility in the digital environment
Brazil has 18.6 million people with disabilities (PwD). Data from the 2022 IBGE shows that 8.9% of the Brazilian population over two years old has some difficulty exercising functional domain activities, such as seeing, walking, hearing, communicating, among others. For these people, day-to-day tasks become more laborious and arduous, especially if the necessary adaptations are not in place to make the activity accessible. Just as the absence of equipment affects practical life, the lack of accessibility hinders the digital life of people with disabilities.
Data from the 2023 TIC Household Survey, from the Regional Center for Studies on the Development of the Information Society (Cetic.br), shows that 84% of the Brazilian population has internet access. This corresponds to 156 million people, among them, PwDs. However, digital accessibility in Brazil is still far from ideal. According to a digital accessibility survey released by technology company BigData Corp, in partnership with the Web for All Movement, only 2.8% of Brazilian websites were adapted, without failures, for people with disabilities in 2024. Compared to 2023 (3.3%), websites saw a 0.4% reduction in digital accessibility.
The creator of the Web for All Movement, Simone Freire, explains that accessibility in the digital world is as important as adaptations in the physical world, such as building a ramp for people with low mobility, a sign language interpreter at a show, or text in braille in a museum.
"When we think about digital accessibility, we can make this analogy of placing a ramp, for instance, on websites. It's putting braille on the app because our life today is digital. To send a WhatsApp, to check our agenda, to make a payment, in short, our life today revolves around digital access. Now imagine if you are not a person who fits the standards of typical people. Surely you will encounter absurd barriers to exercising your citizenship in the digital world. The importance of accessibility on the web is vital," says Simone Freire.
Programming failures
For a site to become accessible, it is necessary to develop tools that transform colors, font styles, letter sizes, and drawings. The CEO of BigData Corp, Thoran Rodrigues, explains that there are five groups that assess whether a site is accessible. The descriptions and structures of images, the organization of links, colors, and fonts are features that, if not designed for everyone, can hinder navigation for people with disabilities.
For computer scientist Rafael Gonçalves, the problem goes much further than the fonts and colors of websites. He argues that programming professionals are not familiar with the basic rules and concepts to make a site accessible. "For a product to be accessible, it takes a team that understands the rules, and most programmers don't understand," he recommends.
Freire argues, however, that digital accessibility is a task for all internet users. "It is everyone's responsibility. We are all content producers who can contribute by adding captions to videos, describing images that I post, for example," she sustains.
Accessibility is also an issue on government websites. According to Cetic's survey, only 10% of government sites are accessible — and still have flaws. Freire believes that the lack of concern with accessibility is historical. "The big issue is that there is a legacy of years where accessibility was not considered. Therefore, government websites are still not prepared for inclusion, but it's beginning to circulate," she says.
Thoran assesses that, although the numbers are not yet satisfactory, the digital world is slowly starting inclusion. "This is largely due to the application of artificial intelligence to try to solve problems like colors, size, style," he adds.
Software engineer Leonardo Gleison, 36, and his wife, Camila Domingues, 33, face daily challenges while navigating the web. The couple is blind, but they have found ways to have a digital life without many problems. They teach other people with disabilities to confront the virtual world through the Inclunet channel on YouTube. "Accessibility, for me, is the ability that I, as a person with a disability, have to perform my daily tasks with total autonomy, whether it be a bank transfer, scheduling an appointment, or buying a product. Today, unfortunately, these activities are still a bit difficult, and we show this in our videos, what real accessibility means," says the engineer.
The biggest problem Leonardo and his wife face is online shopping. "In the virtual store, it's very difficult to have descriptions of the products on sale, and when there are, they are very vague details. E-commerce sells much more by the photo than by what it writes about the product it is selling. So, many times, we end up not being able to buy from all e-commerces because there is no description," he laments. He recounts an episode that describes the situation well. "I was buying a switch online. I asked the seller what the color of the switch was, whether it was white or black. I didn't know. As he had posted the picture with the switch in white, he made fun of me and said it was pink, but I had no way of knowing. These are the types of situations we face, unfortunately," relates Leonardo.
*With Juliana Sousa; interns under the supervision of Carlos Alexandre de Souza
This content was automatically translated with the support of artificial intelligence.
Cetic.br and Unesco
In 2012, Cetic.br became a UNESCO Category 2 Center, the first of its kind dedicated to the development of information and knowledge societies. The Center is linked to the Communication and Information (CI) Sector, one of UNESCO’s five areas of work. It contributes to achieving the organization’s strategic objectives by strengthening its efforts to monitor the building of information and knowledge societies. Cetic.br’s scope of action includes Latin America and the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa.
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