A survey on the awareness of brazilian web development community about cognitive accessibility.

Although the awareness about cognitive disabilities has been increasing in the last few years, it is still less than necessary compared to other disabilities. The need for an investigation about this issue is part of the agenda of the Challenge 2 (Accessibility and Digital Inclusion) from GranDIHC-Br. This paper describes the results of an online exploratory survey conducted with 105 web development professionals to understand their knowledge and barriers regarding accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities. The results evidenced three biases that potentially prevent those professionals from approaching cognitive disabilities: strong organizational barriers; difficulty to understand issues related to cognitive disabilities; a knowledge gap about web accessibility. Thus, we confirmed that web development professionals still lack awareness about cognitive web accessibility, and we suggest that applied research studies focus on how to fill this knowledge gap before providing tools, artifacts or frameworks.