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The Brazilian federal government has promoted several actions towards addressing digital accessibility in e-government systems once it is essential for all citizens to take part on participatory digital governance and have access to important information and online services. In this paper, we evaluate the main web portals of 28 federal agencies with ministry status to check whether they comply with the main laws and standards related to digital accessibility, namely the Accessibility Model in Electronic Government, also known in Portuguese as e-MAG; the Digital Government Identity; and the Accessibility Circumstantial Report. Unfortunately, most federal agencies fail to deliver acceptable levels of accessibility and to present a digital accessibility assessment along with a work plan to address the known issues. We also present an interview with a blind citizen to understand the Brazilian digital accessibility scenario from the perspective of a person with disability. The results of the interview confirmed that, even with the existence of e-MAG, the Brazilian federal government has yet a long way to walk to assure citizens the basic rights to access information, online services and take part in important decisions. CCS Concepts• Human-centered computing➝Accessibility theory, concepts and paradigms• Human-centered computing➝Empirical studies in accessibility • Human-centered computing➝Accessibility systems and tools• Applied computing➝E-government• Information systems➝World Wide Web • Information systems➝Hypertext languages.

Governments use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to provide citizens, organizations and governments with online services and tools. One of the key factors in this context is system interoperability, since it promotes the exchange of information among systems in different levels. Achieving high levels of interoperability, however, is challenging because it involves different concepts, business processes, standards, languages, ontologies and laws. The Brazilian government has defined the e-PING Interoperability Standards to specify the guidelines for achieving interoperability in different levels, but many public organizations cannot completely implement the interoperability aspects in their solutions. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present an investigation we conducted with the ICT departments of the Brazilian federal universities to understand whether and how they use the e-PING interoperability standards, and what are the main challenges. Results show that most universities do not fully implement interoperability requirements mainly because of a shortage of ICT staff, lack of knowledge and lack of clear instructions on how to achieve interoperability using the e-PING standards. Such findings allow us to identify several improvements on the Brazilian egovernment strategy. CCS Concepts• Information systems➝Web applications• Applied computing➝Information integration and interoperability • Applied computing➝E-government • Software and its engineering➝Interoperability.