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

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

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). 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.

The field study is a small-sample (two testers), 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 covers public bodies only, not private-sector digital services generally.

Read the full analysis: https://www.senadis.gob.cl/descarga/i/3676/documento