Challenges to Assess Accessibility in Higher Education Websites: A Comparative Study of Latin America Universities

The Web has revolutionized our daily lives, becoming a prime source of information, knowledge, inquiry, and provision of services in various areas. It is possible to obtain information easily from any institution through the Internet; in fact, the first impression of an organization an individual pe...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2018-01, Vol.6, p.36500-36508
Main Authors: Acosta-Vargas, Patricia, Acosta, Tania, Lujan-Mora, Sergio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accessibility
assess
Browsers
Colleges & universities
Comparative studies
Content management systems
Disabilities
Education
evaluation
Guidelines
higher education
Latin America
Organizations
Portals
university
W3C
Web accessibility
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
Web pages
Web sites
Webometrics
Website
Websites
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The Web has revolutionized our daily lives, becoming a prime source of information, knowledge, inquiry, and provision of services in various areas. It is possible to obtain information easily from any institution through the Internet; in fact, the first impression of an organization an individual perceives is almost always based on its official website. Services related to education are increasing worldwide; therefore, it is important that users, regardless of their disabilities, be able to access these websites in an effective manner. However, the homepages of universities in Latin America still do not meet web accessibility criteria. This paper describes the problems of web accessibility identified in 348 main university websites in Latin America according to their rankings on Webometrics. The results show that the universities' websites have frequent problems related to the lack of alternative image text. It was found that the university websites included in the present study violate Web accessibility requirements based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. The many problems identified concerning Website accessibility indicate that it is necessary to strengthen Web accessibility policies in each country and apply better directives in this area to make Websites more inclusive.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2848978