Impact of COVID-19 in the web accessibility of higher education institutions: a pending challenge

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic forced educational institutions to close and led to a radical transformation of the global education system. This process of change had to take place in a short period of time and, as a result, methodologies and learning tools were adapted. The closure of educational institutions and the disruption to learning impacted all students. However, vulnerable students, including those with disabilities, were particularly affected due to the lack of preparedness for inclusive learning during the rapid transition to emergency online learning. One of the many challenges faced by educational institutions during this transition was ensuring web accessibility for students with disabilities. However, it appears that some of the positive changes that took place in the education system during the pandemic, such as the enhancement of web accessibility, have been declining recently. The aim of this article is to review how a group of universities responded to the closure caused by the pandemic from the point of view of web accessibility, whether they improved the accessibility of their websites and whether this improvement has been maintained over time. To achieve this, the web accessibility of the home pages of selected universities around the world was evaluated against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, for the period from 2018 to 2024. The results show that there was an improvement in web accessibility immediately after the COVID-19 outbreak, but this trend has not been maintained.