Abstract
The human population with disability is rapidly expanding, more than 15% of people worldwide suffer from a disability and, despite the availability of accessibility guidelines, the websites are still inaccessible. Moreover, professionals with knowledge of accessibility and design abilities are hard to come by. Therefore, the current paper addresses the introduction of accessibility to the Software Engineering students through AccessCademy, a gamification-based tool, in a fun way. The activity is delivered via a Web-based learning environment, that presents bad accessibility scenarios or failures based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and then encourages the students to solve them. Furthermore, a case study will be presented that evaluated the learning effectiveness of the tool in the context of a university course. The results demonstrated the potential of AccessCademy which offers students a fun and engaging way to learn about accessibility, to understand the importance of accessible design with WCAG and gain accessible design skills as well. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024.

Abstract
Over the last years, accessibility has been gaining more recognition, hence there is a market demand for professionals skilled in accessibility. Therefore, there is a trend towards incorporating accessibility in computer science curricula. Many approaches were presented in order to teach accessibility in the academy, however many failed in the department of motivation and engagement. Moreover, gamification is a strong contender when it comes to engaging, motivating and improving the students' performance using game design elements in non-game context, and it has not been much explored to teach accessibility in the academy. Consequently, this paper proposes to teach accessibility in the academy through a gamification-based approach. The paper starts with a presentation of the proposed approach and finally concludes the paper along with future research direction.

Abstract
Second Life (SL), a widely used Three-Dimensional Virtual World (3DVW), is being used as a tool for eLearning because of its interaction capabilities. On the other hand, accessibility is growing as a requirement for eLearning software tools, mainly because it can be an important factor for the learning process success by the impaired. In this paper we evaluate the accessibility of SL under WCAG 2.0/2.1 principles, and compare it with Moodle, which is a widely used web-based eLearning tool. We found that neither Moodle nor SL complies with accessibility under WCAG 2.0/2.1 rules, but SL does present itself as more accessible than Moodle. Moreover, WCAG 2.0/2.1 has several requirements specific for web pages, although they do not apply to 3DVWs. In this study, we intent to give a step forward towards evaluating emerging 3D virtual environments, like Metaverse, in the context of accessibility in the eLearning tools.

Abstract
The main purpose for conducting this research is to analyze the core advantages and disadvantages of automatic assessment tools. With this in mind, we considered two different web sites of two distinct Portuguese Universities and compare the accessibility and usability issues found, aiming at identifying core problems through errors / warnings. This outcome will help us understand the weaknesses of such automatic tools and, thus, suggest features that could be added to improve their analysis. These findings will serve as a basis for a proposal of a new type of platform capable of making any web or mobile application accessible to all types of users, regardless of their impairments (e.g., blindness, deafness, motor or intellectual disabilities). © 2022 IEEE.

Abstract
This work focuses on the issues encountered when using current evaluation tools to assess the accessibility and usability of web and mobile applications. Therefore, we present a case study, where we tested three accessibility assessment tools against the official website of Portuguese Institute for Employment and Vocational (IEFP), used by millions of users nationwide. Indeed, we found that individual tools still provide limited coverage of success criteria and, thus, user verification is consistently needed. In this regard, we also aim at proposing a new tool called IncWeb, that can automatically alter any web or mobile application into a usable and fully accessible one, in a way that is transparent to the user and adapted to his type of disability. As such, this work emphasizes the importance of having appropriate tools to facilitate the lives of people with disabilities and/or special needs, presenting not only the problems of other assessment tools, but also proposing a new paradigm-changing solution to overcome those known challenges. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.. All rights reserved.