Exploring the accessibility of four university websites

Abstract

An important objective of the Digital Agenda for Europe is the web accessibility of the public sector. One of the most important goals of this strategy is to ensure equal access to education. To accomplish this goal, systematic evaluation and monitoring measures are needed. This paper aims to explore the accessibility of four university websites for visually impaired people. For each website, the home page and admission page have been analyzed. The approach is based on both automated accessibility validation by using an accessibility checking tool and manual evaluation by using the screen reader. The manual evaluation focused on four criteria: availability of an accessibility tool, zooming behavior, navigation, and contrast. The validation results show that all websites have accessibility errors. The manual evaluation confirmed the low accessibility since none of the websites meets all accessibility criteria.