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Accessibility has become a very important issue to promote inclusion in the Information Society, and people involved in Web development projects have a very important role to contribute with the development of a more inclusive Web. In this paper, we propose an investigation on the accessibility awareness of people involved in Web development in Brazil. We have conducted the research by means of an exploratory survey with a Web based questionnaire and a sample with subjects from academy, industry and government. The study had 613 valid answers and involved representatives from all of the 27 states of Brazil. The results show that accessibility is still far from being actually considered in Web development projects in Brazil, as only 19.9% of the participants have stated that accessibility is considered in their projects. The lack of education on accessibility, as well as the poor spread of the Brazilian accessibility law are important issues to be dealt with to boost a stronger accessibility awareness among people involved in Web development.

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In this paper we investigate the main linguistic phenomena that can make texts complex and how they could be simplified. We focus on a corpus analysis of simple account texts available on the web for Brazilian Portuguese and propose simplification strategies for this language. This study illustrates the need for text simplification to facilitate accessibility to information by poor literacy readers and potentially by people with other cognitive disabilities. It also highlights characteristics of simplification for Portuguese, which may differ from other languages. Such study consists of the first step towards building Brazilian Portuguese text simplification systems. One of the scenarios in which these systems could be used is that of reading electronic texts produced, e.g., by the Brazilian government or by relevant news agencies.