Accessibility and the Right to Information: An Inclusive Digital Dictionary for the Ecuadorian Population with Sensory Disabilities

These dictionaries are resources that directly contribute to strengthening reading skills. As educational tools, access to them should be guaranteed for the entire population. In the case of Ecuador, the public currently lacks a lexical resource of this nature. Moreover, people with visual impairments and deaf individuals have historically been marginalized from access to culture and education in the country. In response to this situation, the PSICO Research Group set out to design a digital dictionary accessible to the entire Ecuadorian population, including people with visual and hearing disabilities. To this end, several working teams were formed: a group of IT professionals, a team of lexicographic writers, and an advisory group composed of people with visual and hearing disabilities. The dictionary was developed in multiple stages and validated by both users without disabilities and individuals with visual and hearing impairments. The main result of this process is a dictionary composed of 5,000 words, each accompanied by definitions and textual citations, 500 of which include Ecuadorian sign language interpretation through videos embedded in a website designed according to screen reader accessibility standards.