FRAMEWORK CONCEITUAL DE APOIO À CRIAÇÃO DE MUSEUS VIRTUAIS COM FOCO EM ACESSIBILIDADE

Abstract

The great changes brought about by the Digital Revolution have affected society as a whole, bringing about changes in economic, political and cultural aspects. Progressively, the Internet has become an important part of the search and access to information, as well as for communication between individuals, especially through the use of the Web, which is one of several Internet access tools. In this way, there was a great increase in the number of websites, virtual spaces that allow a wide variety of users, from different places, to visualize their content. In this context, it was noticed how museums, important institutions that contribute to the maintenance and preservation of the culture of a society, could make use of this form of dissemination of information. Thus, there was the emergence and a constant growth of museums in the form of websites, also called virtual museums, that seek to use the Internet to share their experiences. However, at the same time that many people benefited from the services offered on the Web, there was a portion of individuals who were excluded from this technological advance. This exclusion is due to the fact that the increase in the number of virtual museums has not been accompanied by a concern with the quality of access to them. In this scenario, this paper presents a conceptual framework, which contains a set of Web accessibility guidelines, to try to make a greater number of people able to take advantage of the resources and facilities provided by virtual museums, regardless of their physical limitations or functional. Some of the guidelines that make up the developed framework were applied in a part of an existing virtual museum, and, later, two online tools were used to verify if there were changes regarding accessibility to the museum.