An accessibility analysis of websites of selected types of universities

Abstract

Universities have their websites, web and mobile applications that are aimed at different audiences: candidates students, students, employees and business environment. In the case of public universities this software must be accessible to the widest possible range of users, as well as people with disabilities. The requirements have been imposed on public institutions by current Polish laws. Accordingly, it is necessary to periodically review the compliance with accessibility requirements, and if any requirement is not met by a particular service, the accessibility statement should mention it and state the prospect of remedying it. The aim of the study is to analyze and evaluate the accessibility of websites of various types of selected higher education institutions in Poland, taking into account the type of the university. Accordingly, a study consisting of two stages was performed. The first stage consisted in conducting an expert analysis using a proprietary checklist to verify whether a given site contains selected accessibility features. The second stage consisted in an audit using automated tools that checked various aspects of the application: accessibility (Utilitia, accessiBe), performance (Google PageSpeed Insights) and adaptation to mobile devices (Google Mobile-Friendly Test). Thirty sites were used as research material, each belonging to one of 6 types of higher-education institutions: technical, economic, pedagogical, agricultural/natural science, physical education and a university. The results obtained from the first part of the survey show that university websites are equipped with standard accessibility tools, regardless of which group they belong to - the average accessibility rate for all universities was 63.7%. The second part of the survey showed that the greatest discrepancies between the different types of universities (ranging from 56.4% to 79.6%) occurred in the aspect of website performance. The sites of economic universities performed best in this element (79.6%), while the weakest were those of physical education universities (56.4%).