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Good practice Imported

Ley 20.422 & Decreto No. 1 — Chile's State-Sector Web Accessibility Standard

Chile · Santiago · See the Chile profile · See the Santiago profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 31% 84/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Chile's Ley 20.422 and its 2015 implementing decree require state websites to meet WCAG 2.0 AA under disability agency SENADIS — yet a 2018 field test by visually impaired users found accessibility failures on SENADIS's own site.

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Servicio Nacional de la Discapacidad (SENADIS)
Period
2010–present
Keywords
web accessibility, universal design, WCAG 2.0, disability rights, e-government

Context

Ley 20.422 (2010) frames accessibility and universal design as a right for people with disabilities in Chile; Decreto No. 1 (June 2015) approved binding technical accessibility standards for state-administration websites and information systems, and SENADIS's technical guide (updated 2017) set WCAG 2.0 AA as the required conformance level. The mandate covers public-sector bodies only, with sanctions contemplated for persistent non-compliance.

Objectives

To test, in practice, whether even the disability agency responsible for setting Chile's web accessibility standard meets that standard on its own site.

Activities

A 2018 peer-reviewed field study (Universidad Católica de Temuco researchers Binimelis & Veechi) had two visually-impaired university student volunteers test SENADIS's own website and its Active Transparency Portal using the NVDA screen reader against WCAG's four principles (perceivable, operable, understandable, robust).

Results

Despite SENADIS being the standard-setting agency, testers found scanned/image-only PDFs unreadable by screen readers, hard-to-navigate tables, a non-functional budget-information link, a missing organisational chart, and a broken link to the ChileAtiende services portal.

Conclusions

The field study is a small-sample, single-round test from 2017/2018, not a statistically representative or independently repeated audit, and no more recent, larger-scale compliance study for Chilean state websites was found; the legal mandate itself also covers public bodies only, not private-sector digital services generally.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Servicio Nacional de la Discapacidad (SENADIS) — standard-setting and technical guidance, Universidad Católica de Temuco researchers and visually-impaired student testers who conducted the 2018 field study

Conditions for success

  • A clear legal hierarchy — framework law (Ley 20.422) plus an implementing decree (No. 1, 2015) plus a technical guide (SENADIS, updated 2017) — to translate a general right into a testable technical benchmark (WCAG 2.0 AA)
  • Independent field testing by people with disabilities using assistive technology (screen readers) to surface failures that internal review missed, even on the standard-setter's own site
  • Extending the testable requirement beyond page content to underlying documents (scanned/image-only PDFs) and linked services (ChileAtiende), since failures there blocked real tasks

Common failure modes

  • The disability agency responsible for the standard failed its own benchmark on its own site: unreadable scanned PDFs, hard-to-navigate tables, a broken budget-information link, a missing organisational chart and a broken link to ChileAtiende
  • The legal mandate covers public bodies only, not the private sector broadly
  • No larger-scale or more recent compliance study was found to confirm whether these specific failures, or the broader pattern, have since been fixed

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

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