Evaluation of the web accessibility of higher-education websites (original) (raw)
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This article reports the results of a study that aimed to analyze the level of accessibility of the websites of Colombian universities under the accessibility guidelines for web content, WCAG 2.1. The web portals of 11 universities categorized in the Q1 and Q2 quartiles of the U-sapiens 2020-1 Ranking were analyzed. The results show that no university met all the success criteria, and the most accessible only reached 71.79 % of them. No relationship was found between the accessibility of web pages and the ranking of universities in the U-Sapiens 2020-1 ranking. This indicates that the websites of the universities studied are not fully accessible. Although there are regulations that promote web inclusion for all people, regardless of their disability status, it is necessary to promote educational campaigns that teach and motivate designers, digital content creators, and programmers to consider when developing websites.
IEEE Access, 2018
The Web has revolutionized our daily lives, becoming a prime source of information, knowledge, inquiry, and provision of services in various areas. It is possible to obtain information easily from any institution through the Internet; in fact, the first impression of an organization an individual perceives is almost always based on its official website. Services related to education are increasing worldwide; therefore, it is important that users, regardless of their disabilities, be able to access these websites in an effective manner. However, the homepages of universities in Latin America still do not meet web accessibility criteria. This paper describes the problems of web accessibility identified in 348 main university websites in Latin America according to their rankings on Webometrics. The results show that the universities' websites have frequent problems related to the lack of alternative image text. It was found that the university websites included in the present study violate Web accessibility requirements based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. The many problems identified concerning Website accessibility indicate that it is necessary to strengthen Web accessibility policies in each country and apply better directives in this area to make Websites more inclusive.
2021 IEEE Fifth Ecuador Technical Chapters Meeting (ETCM), 2021
The Web is essential for education and e-learning. This situation has been boosted by migration to distance education due to the SARS-CoV-2. However, students with disabilities have been seriously affected because online teaching is very often not accessible. For this reason, this research aims to evaluate the accessibility of the home pages of the web portals of the Ecuadorian higher education institutions ranked in the Webometrics with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 of the World Wide Web Consortium. The results obtained determined that the 65 home pages analyzed of the web portals have accessibility errors. Therefore, we concluded that we should adopt the WCAG in the websites to comply with the Ecuadorian technical regulation RTE INEN 288 "Accessibility for web content.
Evaluating Web Accessibility of Educational Websites
International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET), 2015
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 ...
Dataset for evaluating the accessibility of the websites of selected Latin American universities
Data in Brief
This article presents the process of building a dataset for evaluation of the accessibility of 368 web pages, beginning with Webometrics rankings, the WAVE tool was used in the evaluation of the web pages. The dataset documents data on repeated errors with higher frequency, in such a way that they alert the web developers, supporting them in creating more inclusive and accessible websites for all types of people, including users with disabilities. The data show that university websites have frequent problems related to the lack of alternative text linked to images. Some of the university websites included in this dataset were found to violate web accessibility requirements based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and 2.1. Therefore, this data has been shared to allow replication of the experiment, and serve as an input to future studies related to web accessibility. The dataset is hosted, with public access, in the Mendeley Dataset Repository.
2017
Evaluating accessibility is an important equity step in assessing the effectiveness and usefulness of online learning materials for students with disabilities such as visual or hearing impairments. Previous studies in this area have indicated that, over time, university websites have become gradually more inaccessible. This paper relates findings of a quantitative, comparative study of university website accessibility for students with disabilities. Sampling comprised a random selection of 20 universities from each of the Academic Ranking of World Universities top 100, Oceania region top 50, and Arab region top 50 ranked universities. AChecker evaluations of three types of website from each university—the home page, the admission page, and a course description page, revealed a total of 30,944 accessibility related home-page errors among the 180 evaluated webpages. Comparison with earlier studies reveals no significant improvement in the accessibility of university websites between 2...
Peruvian Public Universities and the Accessibility of Their Websites
2018
The educational field is not unrelated to the growing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), due to this, Higher Education institutions publish on their websites the most relevant information and services they provide. On the other hand, access to information systems by people with disabilities is a right and to achieve it, it is important that they are designed with accessibility standards. Knowing this problem, a diagnosis was made of a set of Peruvian public universities, in order to know the problems of web accessibility that they present at a global level and provide adequate recommendations. To this end, a set of web pages of Peruvian public universities was selected to be evaluated considering the recommendations of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its Methodology for the Evaluation of Web Accessibility in its version 2.0. Based on the accessibility studies, the way of carrying out the evaluation method was d...
Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, 2016
Accessibility evaluation is an important equity step in assessing effectiveness and usefulness of online learning materials for disabled students. With popular uptake of blended and online learning it is timely to evaluate the accessibility attained by universities in their websites and Learning Management Systems (LMS) .The present study considers this question for the period 2005 through 2015. Previous studies in this area have indicated that university websites have become gradually inaccessible, as the complexity of their content increases, and that the amount of attention being paid to this problem by the universities is low. This study employed a comparative quantitative method, and a random sample of universities’ websites was evaluated using the accessibility evaluation tool designed by AChecker. The inclusion of the specific universities chosen for this study was based on their ranking in the world, and/or in the Oceania and Arab regions. Moreover, the evaluation is organis...
A multi-method evaluation of university website accessibility
Proceedings of the 14th Web for All Conference on The Future of Accessible Work - W4A '17, 2017
Accessibility, which includes usability evaluation, is an important equity step in assessing the effectiveness and usefulness of online learning for students with sensory disabilities. A model for accessibility evaluation has been developed on the basis of a multi-method approach as well as with reference to the characteristics of groups with disabilities and the features of university web-based systems. CCS Concepts Human-centered computing ➝ Accessibility ➝ Accessibility design and evaluation methods Information systems ➝ World Wide Web ➝ Web mining
Guidelines for evaluating web accessibility, level A
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The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) defines the guidelines to facilitate access for people with disabilities to ICT. This article presents a proposal to promote the unification and improvement of the works of two authors, combining the procedures and considerations after the evaluation of some web sites Northeast Argentina (NEA).