Analysis of Iranian and British university websites by world wide web consortium

Abstract

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate various elements of websites and compare the quality of two groups of university website designs. The procedure for the quality assessment of website design involves various modules: Extracting components of websites, validating web pages, and identifying broken links. It continues with collecting the compared data of the existing statement of Iranian and British universities websites. The 5-point scale has been chosen as evaluator tool. Different kinds of tools are used to examine above components. These tools include: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Link Checker, W3C markup validation service, web page analyzer, and website extractor. The W3C statistics findings show that Iranians university websites have high rate of errors compared with British university websites. These errors had been occurred in various levels of the websites: For example, HTML errors, broken links, server connectivity, image load error, and so on. It is clear that some of the websites donot followthe explicit website designing standards like W3Cs standards, and use nonprofessional designers whichcauseescalating the rate of website's errors.

Web Accessibility of the Top Research-Intensive Universities in the UK

“…A comparison of our results with those of other studies that explored the web accessibility of UK universities, such as those by Abu Shawar (2015) and Rashidi et al (2013), highlighted some similarities in the results. Although the two other studies had significantly smaller samples, they explored more webpages from the sample of universities.…”

“…This highlights that there are some universities that take web accessibility more seriously, and which can share best practice guidelines and tips on how to create web accessible webpages. The impact of checkpoint violations was emphasized by Rashidi et al (2013), who examined webpage errors in 10 UK university websites. These were divided into major and minor errors.…”

“…The results indicated that the accessibility errors of the university websites in Jordan and the Arab regions were greater than those in the UK. Rashidi et al (2013) studied various elements of the websites of British and Iranian university websites to compare their quality, focusing less on web accessibility and more on the usability of the web pages. Their results showed that websites for Iranian universities contained higher rates of error compared to British ones.…”