Evaluating Web Accessibility of Educational Websites

Abstract

Abstract-Web accessibility concerns of building websites that are accessible by all people regardless of their ability or disability. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has been established to raise awareness of universal access. WAI develops guidelines which can help to ensure that Web pages are widely accessible. Assistive technology is used to increase, improve, and maintain capabilities of disabled persons to execute tasks that are sometimes difficult or impossible to do without technical aid. Also it helps them achieve their scholar, professional and social activities. This paper exposes an approach to investigate accessible contents of educational websites to ensure and measure its compliance with accessibility standards for visually impaired people. This study focuses on studying existing standards and investigating its applicability on educational institute websites. This will increase accessibility on e-learning materials that are provided by educational institutes. In this paper a sample of websites at selected universities in Jordan are evaluated in terms of accessibility in comparison to some universities websites in England and Arabic region. Results show that accessibility errors of universities websites in Jordan, and Arab region exceed the ones in UK by 13 times, and 5 times consequently.

Evaluating Accessibility of Malaysian Public Universities Websites using AChecker and WAVE

“…Overall, the results provide evidence that the level of compliance with respect to web accessibility requirements is relatively very low amongst the public universities in Malaysia. The results seem consistent with what has been reported by similar studies worldwide such as in the Middle East countries (Shawar, 2015), Nigeria (Adepoju & shehu, 2014), Argentina (Laitano, 2015) and Malaysia (Abdul Latif & Masrek, 2010;Abdul Aziz et al, 2010;Abuaddous et al, 2013). AChecker classifies accessibility-related problems into three categories.…”

“…(2015) who diagnosed Argentine public universities, websites based on WCAG 2.0 guidelines indicated serious accessibility issues for most parts of the websites, particularly on the syntax, presentation of the web content and non-text content, and visual readability of the text. Finally, a cross-countries study on selected higher education institutions in the Middle East and England concluded that website accessibility in developed countries was better off than the developing economies (Shawar, 2015).…”

Exploring WHO Communication during the COVID 19 Pandemic through the WHO Website Based on W3C Guidelines: Accessible for All?

“…The methodology was combined using a web accessibility evaluation tool and manual analysis carried out by an evaluator [ 38 , 39 ]. The tool used for accessibility evaluation was the Wave tool [ 40 ], developed by the WebAIM organisation. The website accessibility conformity assessment methodology (WCAG-EM) was used, which is considered in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 but is applicable to WCAG 2.1 [ 41 ].…”

Web Accessibility Status of Leading Universities in USA

“…Similarly, Curl and Browsers (2009) examined web site accessibility over a five year period between 2003 and 2008.They examined 45 universities to compare the result of the different time periods and found that web site accessibility was improved after five years in general and yet, 75.6% of the web sites had errors and did not meet web content accessibility guidelines. Kurt (2011) and Shawar (2015) focused on delving into their own countries' web accessibility issues. Kurt (2011) examined the website accessibility of university for people with visually impaired in Turkey.…”