Evaluating the accessibility of higher education institution websites in the State of Kuwait: empirical evidence

AlMeraj, Zainab; Boujarwah, Fatima A.; Alhuwail, Dari; Qadri, Rumana

doi:10.1007/s10209-020-00717-8

Cited by 31 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Only the landing webpage of every website was used in the evaluation. This is because a landing page is deemed an entry point for any website [45,46]. Thus, it gives an overview of how the entire website content is developed in terms of accessibility features and support.…”

Section: Website Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating the accessibility of public health websites: An exploratory cross-country study

Alajarmeh

2021

Univ Access Inf Soc

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Public health websites are regarded as official references that citizens of any country rely on for domestic and individual health affairs. For people with disabilities, public health resources are often of greater importance; they additionally provide disability context-specific information. However, to leverage the benefits of such resources for the widest demographic groups, Web accessibility requirements should be met at an acceptable level (e.g., WCAG 2.0, Level AA). This study evaluates the accessibility of a number of public health websites from 25 countries. The choice of the selected websites is determined by the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak in the corresponding countries and their rank as of late April, 2020. Ultimately, this study aims at shedding light on the current situation of accessibility to health information and pinpointing the aspects where accessibility to information falls short in public health websites. Using different evaluation tools, the overall results show that the vast majority of public health websites, of a number of different countries, still have many critical accessibility barriers, especially with regards to the perception of information and operability of the interface items. The findings of this study suggest a need for major efforts toward ensuring accessible public health resources in most of the evaluated websites. As this pattern has repeatedly occurred in many relevant studies in different parts of the world, legislation along with educating Web developers regarding Web accessibility requirements and universal design principles become an urgent necessity.

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Section: Website Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating the accessibility of public health websites: An exploratory cross-country study

Alajarmeh

2021

Univ Access Inf Soc

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“…To the result of the background study, the majority of the previous studies proposed web accessibility evaluation techniques using several existing automated tools. AlMeraj et al [ 5 ] present the evaluation result for higher education websites of Kuwait using three automated website accessibility testing tools, such as AChecker [ 28 ], total validator [ 29 ], and WAVE [ 30 ]. It shows that, of 48 websites, only 11 websites were found accessible through the evaluation tools.…”

Section: Background Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, the accessibility of online information is a crucial aspect for technologists and researchers. Nowadays, several past studies revealed that a large amount of online content such as websites are not accessible for people with disabilities [ 3 , 5 ]. Generally, the website is a digital platform for sharing a variety of information (healthcare, education, e-commerce, etc.)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigation of COVID-19 Vaccine Information Websites across Europe and Asia Using Automated Accessibility Protocols

Ara

Sik-Lányi

2022

IJERPH

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Websites content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) ensure that websites should be perceivable, understandable, navigable, and interactive. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the importance of accessible websites and online content grew throughout the world. Therefore, in this study, we examined COVID-19-related official government websites. This research covered 21 government websites, with 13 websites from European countries and 8 websites from Asian countries, to evaluate their accessibility following WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 guidelines. The overall goal of this study was to identify the frequent accessibility problems that might help the website owners to identify the shortcomings of their websites. The target websites were evaluated in two steps: in step-1, evaluation was performed through four automatic web accessibility testing tools such as Mauve++, Nibbler, WAVE, and WEB accessibility tools; in step-2, evaluation went through human observation, such as system usability testing and expert testing. The automatic evaluation results showed that few of the websites were accessible; a significant number of websites were not accessible for people with disabilities. In addition, system usability testing found some complexity in website organization, short explanations, and outdated information. The expert testing suggested improving the color of the websites, organization of links, buttons, and font size. This study might be helpful for associated authorities to improve the quality of the websites in the future.

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“… [ 73 ] Europe Italy WCAG 2.1 Stanca Act [ 74 ] Asia Turkey ISO/IEC 40500:2012 (WCAG 2.0) . [ 75 ] Asia Kuwait ISO/IEC 40500:2012 (WCAG 2.0) . [ 76 ] America, Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, UK, USA WCAG 2.1 .…”

Section: Appendix: Data Collected and Errorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… [ 74 ] All universities 179 (110 public) (69 private) Homepages 179 . [ 75 ] Sampling 41 Homepages 41 . [ 76 ] Sampling 142 (Shanghai Ranking) .…”

Section: Appendix: Data Collected and Errorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accessibility of university websites worldwide: a systematic literature review

Campoverde-Molina

Luján-Mora

Valverde

2021

Univ Access Inf Soc

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The identity and institutional image of universities are presented to the world through their websites. On their websites, universities publish their academic offerings, their mission, their vision, their academic objectives, their achievements, their regulations, their news and all their university work. Hence, the importance of university websites is accessible. The accessibility of university websites has been evaluated several times in the past, but there is no work that has summarized all the evaluations performed to provide a general overview of the situation. Therefore, in this research we have performed a systematic literature review (SLR) to consolidate, analyze, synthesize and interpret the accessibility results of university websites published in 42 papers that have been selected for this study. The methodology used in this SLR was that proposed in Kitchenham’s guidelines, which includes three stages: planning the review, conducting the review and reporting the review. The results present the analysis and synthesis of the evaluations of 9,140 universities in 67 countries. Of these, 38,416 web pages, 91,421 YouTube videos and 28,395 PDF documents were evaluated. Manual methods, methods with automatic tools and the combination of both methods were used for the evaluation. Most websites were evaluated using the ISO/IEC 40500:2012 and Section 508 standards. The accessibility guidelines most commonly violated in the evaluations were: adaptable, compatible, distinguishable, input assistance, keyboard accessible, navigable, predictable, readable and text alternatives. In conclusion, the university websites, YouTube videos and PDF documents analyzed in the 42 papers present important accessibility problems. The main contribution of this SLR is the consolidation of the results of the 42 studies selected to determine the findings and trends in the accessibility of university websites around the world.

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Evaluating the accessibility of higher education institution websites in the State of Kuwait: empirical evidence

Cited by 31 publications

References 37 publications

Evaluating the accessibility of public health websites: An exploratory cross-country study

Evaluating the accessibility of public health websites: An exploratory cross-country study

Investigation of COVID-19 Vaccine Information Websites across Europe and Asia Using Automated Accessibility Protocols

Accessibility of university websites worldwide: a systematic literature review

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