Evaluation of the Accessibility of the Homepages of the Web Portals of Ecuadorian Higher Education Institutions Ranked in Webometrics

The Web is essential for education and e-learning. This situation has been boosted by migration to distance education due to the SARS-Co V-2. However, students with disabilities have been seriously affected because online teaching is very often not accessible. For this reason, this research aims to evaluate the accessibility of the homepages of the web portals of the Ecuadorian higher education institutions ranked in the Webometrics with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 of the World Wide Web Consortium. The results obtained determined that the 65 homepages analyzed of the web portals have accessibility errors. Therefore, we concluded that we should adopt the WCAG in the web sites to comply with the Ecuadorian technical regulation RTE INEN 288 “Accessibility for web content.”This work was supported by the Catholic University of Cuenca; the EduTech project (609785-EPP-1-2019-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP) co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union and the project “Development of IoT systems for people with disabilities” (PID2019-111196RB-I00) of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation