Evaluation of the web accessibility of higher-education websites

This article describes a study to assess the accessibility of the contents concerning the websites of 20 universities from all around the world. The accessibility assessment was carried out to verify compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The main goal of this study is to determine if even people with disabilities can access and use websites of the universities with higher academic prestige. Besides, in our approach we also make use of the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) is an approach for determining how well a website conforms to WCAG 2.0. The WCAG-EM provides a guidance on using the methodology and considerations for specific situations. From the results, we can conclude that the majority of the tested websites do not achieve an acceptable level of compliance. Universities with high academic prestige do not show a greater level of web accessibility. By performing the evaluation of university websites, we have identified that there are major barriers to a large number of users.