skip to main content
10.1145/1243441.1243472acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication Pagesw4aConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

A web accessibility report card for top international university web sites

Published: 07 May 2007 Publication History

Abstract

University web pages play a central role in the activities of current and prospective postsecondary students. University sites that are not accessible may exclude people with disabilities from participation in educational, social and professional activities. In order to assess the current state of university web site accessibility, we performed a multi-method analysis of the home pages of 100 top international universities. Each site was analyzed for compliance with accessibility standards, image accessibility, alternate-language and text-only content, and quality of web accessibility statements. Results showed that many top universities continue to have accessibility problems. University web site accessibility also varies greatly across different countries and geographic regions. Remaining obstacles to universal accessibility for universities include low accessibility in non-English-speaking countries and absent or low-quality accessibility policies.

References

[1]
Abascal, J., Arrue, M., Fajardo, I., Garay, N., and Tomas, J. 2004. The use of guidelines to automatically verify web accessibility. Universal Access in the Information Society, 3, 1, 71--79.
[2]
Bailey, J. and Burd, E. 2005. Web Accessibility Evolution in the United Kingdom. In Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE international Symposium on Web Site Evolution - Volume 00 (September 26, 2005). WSE. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 79--86.
[3]
Bigham, J. P., Kaminsky, R. S., Ladner, R. E., Danielsson, O. M., and Hempton, G. L. 2006. WebInSight:: making web images accessible. In Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Portland, Oregon, USA, October 23-25, 2006). Assets '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 181--188.
[4]
Bohman, P. R. 2003. University web accessibility policies: a bridge not quite far enough. http://webaim.org/coordination/articles/policies-pilot
[5]
Brajnik, G. 2006. Automatic monitoring of web accessibility: the validity issues. In Proceedings of 2006 Workshop on Web Accessibility and Metamodelling (WWAM) (Grimstad, Norway, June 12-14, 2006). WWAM '06. European Internet Accessibility Observatory, Grimstad, Norway, 1--9.
[6]
Brajnik, G., Cancila, D., Nicoli, D., and Pignatelli, M. 2005. Do text transcoders improve usability for disabled users?. In Proceedings of the 2005 international Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A) (Chiba, Japan, May 10, 2005). W4A '05, vol. 88. ACM Press, New York, NY, 9--17.
[7]
Chisholm, W., Vanderheiden, G., and Jacobs, I. 2001. Web content accessibility guidelines 1.0. interactions, 8, 4 (Jul. 2001), 35--54.
[8]
DRES/CITES. 2007. DRES/CITES web accessibility best practices. http://html.cita.uiuc.edu
[9]
Diaper, D., and Worman, L. 2003. Two falls out of three in the automated accessibility assessment of world wide web sites: A-Prompt v. Bobby. In P. Johnson and P. Palanque, (Eds.), People and Computers XVII. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 349--363.
[10]
Ellison, J. 2004. Assessing the accessibility of fifty United States government web pages: using Bobby to check on Uncle Sam. First Monday, 9, 7. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/ellison/
[11]
Flowers, C., Bray, M., and Algozzine, R. 1999. Accessibility of special education program home pages. Journal of Special Education Technology, 14, 2, 21--26.
[12]
Gunderson, J., Rangin, H. B., and Hoyt, N. 2006. Functional web accessibility techniques and tools from the university of Illinois. In Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Portland, Oregon, USA, October 23--25, 2006). Assets '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 269--270.
[13]
Hackett, S., Parmanto, B., and Zeng, X. 2005. A retrospective look at website accessibility over time. Behavior and Information Technology, 24, 6, 407--417.
[14]
Horrigan, J., and Rainie, L. 2006. The internet's growing role in life's major moments. Pew Internet and American Life Project. http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Major%20Moments_2006.pdf
[15]
Jackson-Sanborn, E., Odess-Harnish, K., and Warren, N. 2002. Web site accessibility: a study of six genres. Library Hi Tech, 20, 3, 308--317.
[16]
Johnson, K., Brown, S., Amtmann, D., and Thompson, T. 2003. Web accessibility in post-secondary education: legal and policy considerations. Information Technology and Disabilities, 9, 2. http://www.rit.edu/~easi/itd/itdv09n2/johnson.htm
[17]
Jones, S., and Madden, M. 2002. The internet goes to college: How students are living in the future with today's technology. Pew Internet and American Life Project. http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_College_Report.pdf
[18]
Kelly, B. 2002. An accessibility analysis of UK university entry points. Ariadne, 33, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/web-watch
[19]
Lazar, J., Dudley-Sponaugle, A., and Greenidge, K.-D. 2004. Improving web accessibility: a study of webmaster perceptions; the compass of human-computer interaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 20, 2, 269--288.
[20]
Lazar, J., and Greenidge, K.-D. 2006. One year older, but not necessarily wiser: an evaluation of homepage accessibility problems over time. Universal Access in the Information Society, 4, 4, 285--291.
[21]
Lilly, E., and Van Fleet, C. 1999. Wired but not connected: accessibility of academic library home pages. The Reference Librarian, 67--68, 5--28.
[22]
Mankoff, J., Fait, H., and Tran, T. 2005. Is your web page accessible?: a comparative study of methods for assessing web page accessibility for the blind. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Portland, Oregon, USA, April 02--07, 2005). CHI '05. ACM Press, New York, NY, 41--50.
[23]
Parmanto, B., and Zeng, X. 2005. Metric for web accessibility evaluation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56, 13, 1394--1404.
[24]
Richards, J. T. and Hanson, V. L. 2004. Web accessibility: a broader view. In Proceedings of the 13th international Conference on World Wide Web (New York, NY, USA, May 17--20, 2004). WWW'04. ACM Press, New York, NY, 72--79.
[25]
Rowland, C. 2000. Accessibility of the internet in postsecondary education: meeting the challenge. http://www.webaim.org/articles/meetchallenge/
[26]
Schmetzke, A. 2001. Web accessibility at university libraries and library schools. Library Hi Tech, 19, 1, 35--49.
[27]
Scale, J. 2003. Supporting the development of e-learning accessibility practices: new and emergent roles for staff developers. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE) (Adelaide, Australia, December 7--10, 2003). ASCILITE 2003. ASCILITE, Adelaide, Australia, 458i464.
[28]
Shneiderman, B. 2000. Universal usability. Communications of the ACM, 43, 5, 84--91.
[29]
Sloan, D., Gregor, P., Booth, P., and Gibson, L. 2002. Auditing accessibility of UK higher education web sites. Interacting with Computers, 14, 4, 313--325.
[30]
Sloan, M. 2001. Web accessibility and the DDA. Journal of Information, Law and Technology, 2, 1--2.
[31]
Stewart, R., Narendra, V., and Schmetzke, A. 2005. Accessibility and usability of online library databases. Library Hi Tech, 23, 2, 265--286.
[32]
Thompson, T., Burgstahler, S., and Comden, D. 2003. Research on web accessibility in higher education. Information Technology and Disabilities, 9, 2. http://www.rit.edu/~easi/itd/itdv09n2/thompson.htm
[33]
Times Higher Education Supplement. 2006. World university rankings 2006. http://www.thes.co.uk/worldrankings/
[34]
U.S. Department of Justice. 2001. Electronic and information technology accessibility standards (Section 508).
[35]
Web Accessiblity in Mind. n.d. WebAIM: World laws. http://www.webaim.org/articles/laws/world/
[36]
Willison, R., and Bellaby, G. 2003. SENDA and university homepages. In Proceedings of the 4th Annual Conference of the LTSN Centre for Information and Computer Sciences (LTSN-ICS) (Galway, Ireland, August 26--28, 2003). LTSN-ICS 2003. http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/Events/conf2003/roger_wilson.htm
[37]
World Wide Web Consortium. 2002. Developing organizational policies on web accessibility. http://www.w3.org/WAI/impl/pol
[38]
Zaphiris, P., and Ellis, R. D. 2001. Website usability and content accessibility of the top USA universities. In Proceedings of WebNet 2001 World Conference on the WWW and Internet (WebNet) (Orlando, FL, USA, October 23--27, 2001). WebNet 2001. AACE, Orlando, FL., 1380--1385.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Accessibility Analysis of Educational Websites Using WCAG 2.0Digital Government: Research and Practice10.1145/36963185:3(1-28)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
  • (2024)“Not Only Annoying but Dangerous”: devising an ecology of protections for photosensitive social media usersProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675610(1-14)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Light and Dark ModeProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36435398:1(1-23)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
W4A '07: Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A)
May 2007
179 pages
ISBN:1595935908
DOI:10.1145/1243441
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 May 2007

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. WCAG
  2. accessibility
  3. education
  4. evaluation
  5. section 508
  6. web

Qualifiers

  • Article

Acceptance Rates

W4A '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 11 of 27 submissions, 41%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)48
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
Reflects downloads up to 23 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Accessibility Analysis of Educational Websites Using WCAG 2.0Digital Government: Research and Practice10.1145/36963185:3(1-28)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
  • (2024)“Not Only Annoying but Dangerous”: devising an ecology of protections for photosensitive social media usersProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675610(1-14)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Light and Dark ModeProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36435398:1(1-23)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Turning manual web accessibility success criteria into automatic: an LLM-based approachUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-024-01108-zOnline publication date: 16-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Türkiye’deki üniversite web sitelerinin erişilebilirliği: Web içeriği erişilebilirlik kılavuzu kapsamında bir değerlendirmeAccessibility of university websites in Türkiye: An evaluation using website content accessibility guidelinesSakarya Üniversitesi İşletme Enstitüsü Dergisi10.47542/sauied.12474275:2(65-75)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Towards real-time and large-scale web accessbilityProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3608403(1-9)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Exploring the Accessibility of Crypto TechnologiesExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585746(1-10)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Quantifying the Cost of Web Accessibility Barriers for Blind UsersInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwad00434:6(137-149)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2023
  • (2022)Unified Website Accessibility Assessment FrameworkApp and Website Accessibility Developments and Compliance Strategies10.4018/978-1-7998-7848-3.ch006(135-168)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2022)Web Accessibility Analysis of Indonesia Inclusive Vocational High SchoolsProceedings of the 4th Vocational Education International Conference (VEIC 2022)10.2991/978-2-494069-47-3_41(355-367)Online publication date: 16-Dec-2022
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media