eMAG & TIC Web Acessibilidade — Brazil's Mandatory E-Government Accessibility Model and Independent Compliance Monitor

Brazil's federal government mandated web accessibility in 2007 (Portaria SLTI/MP no. 3), institutionalising the eMAG (Modelo de Acessibilidade em Governo Eletronico), a WCAG 2.0-aligned set of recommendations first published in 2005 and updated to version 3.1 in 2014 by the Secretaria de Governo Digital together with the Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Sul. Compliance with eMAG is mandatory for all sites and portals within the federal public administration's information-technology system (SISP).
Rather than relying only on agency self-reporting, NIC.br's Ceweb.br programme runs TIC Web Acessibilidade, an independently conducted annual survey, built with the Federal University of Minas Gerais, that automatically scores gov.br websites against eMAG/WCAG criteria. Its first full collection assessed 418 government websites and 267,090 pages: zero sites scored in the 95-100% conformance band, only 60 sites scored 85-94.99%, and just a single page out of the 267,090 evaluated had zero detected errors. The most common failure -- basic HTML markup validity -- appeared on more than 99% of pages evaluated.
The pairing of a mandatory standard with an independent, large-scale, recurring public audit is unusual and valuable: it turns a paper mandate into a measurable, longitudinal record of a persistent implementation gap, rather than letting agencies self-certify success. The honest, mostly negative findings are themselves the evidence base that Brazil's federal web estate still has far to go, and they give reformers concrete targets rather than aspirational claims.

Read the full analysis: https://emag.governoeletronico.gov.br/