Mobile Applications Accessibility: An Evaluation of the Local Portuguese Press

Abstract

The local press has always played a central role in the Portuguese society. Recently, new innovative technological projects to develop mobile applications and focus on local journalism in Portugal have emerged. These initiatives allow the development of better and more appealing services for local users. However, due to the important social role of the local press, this also brings along some responsibilities. Our main research goal is to study the accessibility issues in local journalism in Portugal. To this end, we first describe the current situation of local journalism in Portugal and some accessibility issues raised by the appearance of mobile applications. We then develop a simple checklist that allows the assessment of whether these applications have prevented social exclusion and facilitated the access of local information to a wide range of users, including disabled citizens. This tool provides the regional news publisher with information to improve its Citation: Santos Gonçalves, T.; Ivars-Nicolás, B.; Martínez-Cano, F.J. Mobile Applications Accessibility: An Evaluation of the Local Portuguese Press. Informatics 2021, 8, 52. https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics 8030052 Academic Editor: Sharath Chandra Guntuku Received: 6 July 2021 Accepted: 6 August 2021 Published: 10 August 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). democratization of access to local information in Portugal. Using the cognitive walkthrough method, we illustrate the proposed framework by presenting case studies of five mobile applications in Portuguese local and regional press. This study concludes that despite the great potential that mobile applications showcase, several accessibility issues have not been properly addressed.