Observatorio de Accesibilidad Digital — Uruguay's Six-Monthly Open-Data Accessibility Measurement

AGESIC, Uruguay's e-government agency, runs a public Observatorio de Accesibilidad Digital that audits the institutional websites, cross-government platforms and online transactions (trámites) of state bodies against WCAG 2.1. The legal base is Article 88 of Law 19.924 and its regulatory Decree 406/022 of 22 December 2022. Results are published every six months through an open visualiser and accompanying open datasets on the national data catalogue, covering 130 public organisations — one of the few national accessibility observatories in Latin America publishing longitudinal, machine-comparable conformance data rather than one-off audits.
Measurement is paired with remediation. AGESIC runs a Programa de Accesibilidad en Entornos Digitales that walks organisations through their first adaptation cycle, and the fourth six-monthly measurement, taken in October 2025 and published in December 2025, reports what that produces: organisations that carried out their first adaptation process together with AGESIC showed a 69% reduction in the errors previously identified. Across the whole estate, 48% of institutional portals of the Uruguayan state reduced their accessibility errors compared with the April 2025 results, and more than 13,000 public-body web pages were free of accessibility errors — 28% of all pages surveyed.
The most important figure is the least flattering one, and AGESIC published it. The October update added an analysis of 16 transactions specifically oriented to people with disabilities; of those evaluated, 31% complied with the digital accessibility guidelines. The services most directly aimed at disabled users are the ones least likely to work for them.
Two caveats bound what these numbers mean. The measurement is automated — Total Validator plus W3C validators, crawling 500 pages per site to a maximum depth of three levels — and AGESIC itself states in its published methodology that automatic tools detect only an estimated 25% to 30% of total accessibility problems, cannot weight errors by context and cannot complete forms. A page recorded as error-free is therefore not demonstrated to be usable by a disabled person. No co-design or user testing with disabled people is published as part of the measurement loop. Independent validation is limited: the observatory's figures are self-published by the implementing agency, though the page-level data is open and publicly re-checkable, and AGESIC's public-innovation work has been recognised by SEGIB among Ibero-American public innovation experiences rather than independently audited.

Read the full analysis: https://www.gub.uy/agencia-gobierno-electronico-sociedad-informacion-conocimiento/comunicacion/noticias/48-portales-institucionales-uruguay-redujeron-errores-accesibilidad-digital