Pandemic Crisis Brings More Digital Governmental Services to Mobile Devices-But Are They Accessible to People with Disabilities?

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory study to investigate the level of accessibility of Brazilian governmental mobile applications with essential services with increased use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Evaluations were performed using automated tests on the applications, using the MATE (Mobile Accessibility Testing) tool. The study included fifteen applications, divided into three groups: health, public banking and social and information services. The problems encountered were categorized according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Mobile accessibility criteria. The results show the main types of violations of the guidelines in government applications, with a discussion of how these errors impact the use of users and possible difficulties users with different disabilities would encounter. Many such applications still present severe accessibility problems, such as unlabeled images with CAPTCHA, lack of labels for form fields, color contrast and inaccessibility of buttons and interface activators. The paper presents implications for the improvement of these technologies and recommendations to overcome the accessibility issues encountered to improve the continued use of these technologies by people with disabilities during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.