Does the law matter? An empirical study on the accessibility of Finnish higher education institutions’ web pages

Abstract

Information and communication technology (ICT) has made higher education available to many students in a new way. The role of online learning in higher education institutions (HEIs) has grown to an unprecedented scale due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The diversity of higher education students has increased, and accessible solutions are needed. New European and national regulations support these trends. The research reported in this paper was conducted in Finland, which is one of the leading European countries in terms of high technology and digitalisation. The aim of this research is to explore the accessibility of all Finnish HEIs’ (N = 38) landing pages based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1). The situations before and after recent legislation are compared. Previous studies have shown that HEIs’ landing pages typically have many accessibility errors. Unlike previous studies, this study considered the types of accessibility errors at a detailed level to support HEIs’ development and implementation of accessibility standards. A combination of two automated accessibility testing tools was used, and the performance of individual tools was analysed. The results show that HEIs’ landing pages are not accessible and there are enormous differences between institutions. Two clusters of HEIs were found: one with good accessibility in terms of WCAG 2.1’s four principles (perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust), and one with poor accessibility. On half of the HEIs’ landing pages with poor accessibility, the number of errors increased even given the binding nature of the law. Obviously, there is still work to be done. Implications for practice are also discussed.

Exploring the accessibility of four university websites

“…Laamanen et al [11] tested 38 homepages of Finnish universities by using WAVE and Siteimprove accessibility checking tools. The results showed low accessibility, with an average of 65 errors per institution detected with WAVE, with a maximum of 1 and a maximum of 704.…”

“…The results are presented in Table 1. The most frequent errors on the home page are related to the use of tags vs. CSS (64), text describing link purpose (24), text alternative (11), and table issues (10). The most frequent errors on the admission page are related to the text describing link purpose (21), improper heading ordering (14), and use of tags vs. CSS (5).…”

How Effective Are Web Accessibility Regulations?

“…Prior research studies (Loiacono and Djamasbi, 2013;Stuy, 2018) have examined the influence of legislation on corporate decision to provide an accessible website and concluded that there is significant need for legislative amendments for enhanced corporate compliance. A survey of 8057 municipal websites ten years after the enactment of the Stanca Act in Italy, revealed that most websites are not accessible, some failing even very basic tests of accessibility (Barricelli et al, 2018)., Laamanen, et al (2022)'s study of Finnish higher education institutions' web pages using accessibility checkers revealed an average number of 119 errors per institution (minimum 3 and maximum 1165), despite the European Union's various policies and initiatives aimed at establishing an equal society and Finland's Act 306 of 2019 on the Provision of Digital Services. Motivated by these studies, we pose two research questions.…”