Compliance with web content accessibility guidelines in ophthalmology social media posts

Abstract

This is a cross-sectional exploratory analysis of publicly available Internet data to examine compliance to web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) on patient education social media posts in ophthalmology. WCAG ensures web content accessibility for those with disabilities (including visual impairment). A total of 100 social media posts were sampled from ten ophthalmology patient education social media pages and ten non-ophthalmology (cardiopulmonary) pages as the comparison group. Three independent graders evaluated the selected posts based on the WCAG 2 checklist by WebAIM, a non-profit affiliated with Utah State University, after its adaptation for social media posts. Validated accessibility standard labels: “0” for not meeting any standards, “1” or “A” for meeting bare minimum accessibility requirements, “2” or “AA” for meeting legal accessibility requirements, or “3” or “AAA” for exceeding accessibility requirements. There was not enough evidence to detect a difference in WCAG scores between ophthalmology and non-ophthalmology posts (p = 0.80). Forty-nine percent of scores for ophthalmology social media posts showed no compliance with any WCAG. The most common reasons that ophthalmology posts failed to meet criteria were due to color and contrast issues (39%). Most ophthalmology social media posts had low WCAG scores, indicating poor compliance to WCAG. Because social media is highly visual, reduced compliance to WCAG may create barriers for low vision individuals to successfully access patient education social media content.