Accessibility difference in education-related websites from developing and developed countries

Abstract

In recent years, websites have become the key source of information for most people. There are several websites related to education, healthcare, government, e-commerce, and so on. These websites are used by a large population to access required information. Web content must meet the accessibility guidelines for websites to be accessible to all users, including people with different ranges of abilities across the globe. Thus, accessibility of the web is the prime facet of every website. This paper focuses on identifying accessibility differences in education boards or similar websites anchoring higher-level schools' leaving examinations. We have considered evaluating the accessibility of landing pages of 13 educational websites from a developing and developed group of countries. Six Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) tools from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) were considered for evaluating each website. We have tabulated the results of each tool, highlighted the different accessibility issues for each website, and provided alternate suggestions that web developers can consider for resolve any issues. From the results we noted that the developing group of countries reported the maximum number of accessibility issues when compared to the developed group of countries. Selected webpages of developing and developed countries identified text contrast failures, and non-text contrast failures respectively. The education board websites of India and Japan were identified as having the maximum number of accessibility issues when compared to other selected websites.