Ecuador's WCAG 2.0 AA Web-Accessibility Mandate — a Binding Law With Near-Zero Measured Compliance

On 28 January 2014, Ecuador's national standards body (INEN) published NTE INEN-ISO/IEC 40500, an identical adoption of WCAG 2.0. A follow-up technical regulation, RTE INEN 288 (10 February 2016), made WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance mandatory for public-service websites, phased in via Level A by 8 August 2018 and Level AA by 8 August 2020, enforced through a first-party conformity certificate that sites must display.
Ecuador is one of relatively few Latin American countries to legislate a binding, dated WCAG compliance deadline rather than a voluntary guideline, positioning digital accessibility as a citizen-rights and public-procurement requirement enforced by INEN and championed by the disability-equality council CONADIS.
An independent academic audit (Acosta & Luján-Mora, Enfoque UTE, 2017) tested 44 of Ecuador's 47 accredited university websites in July 2016 using the automated Examinator tool. It found that none of the universities met RTE INEN 288: average score 5.0/10 (range 2.7–7.9), with 8,970 individual accessibility errors across 54 distinct error types — 59% in the "Perceivable" principle alone. The finding shows that a strong legal mandate did not, by itself, translate into compliant websites in the sector studied.
Caveat: the audit covers universities, not the full population of "public-service" sites the regulation targets, and predates the 2020 enforcement deadline; more recent government-wide compliance data was not found in public reporting.

Read the full analysis: https://accesibilidadweb.dlsi.ua.es/?menu=ecuador