

The study aim is to characterize the accessibility of all Public Portuguese Universities' sites and their relation with the support services offered to disabled students. We recurred to two different on-line automatic tools: Using the “eXaminator” – a report generating tool – it was used to determine quickly the conformance of Web sites to checkpoints, which can be automatically evaluated; Using “HERA” - a tool that performs a preliminary set of tests on the page – used to identify any automatically detectable errors or checkpoints, and which ones need further manual verification. These tools were chosen due to the Portuguese Government recommendation to public in general as the ones to be used to perform accessibility check-ups. Thus we use these tools to present a brief characterization of the sites' accessibility. Following this work, we chose all the sites that stated to have specific services to support disabled students and did a more profound analysis looking for: (a) Identification of existent university services to disabled students; (b) Identification of the gap between the existent services and the needs of the disabled students; (c) Identification of the relations between the accessibility' scores and the services universities offer. The main findings of this study will be presented in the conference, and reveal the need for further studies: For better understanding disabled students' needs and rights and betting in the power of the new technologies, it is possible to organize a service support model to be followed by universities in order to provide quality education to all their students.