Web accessibility investigation and identification of major issues of higher education websites with statistical measures: A case study of college websites

Websites as a Gate of Pharmacy Schools to the World: Does National Accreditation Cause a Difference?

Objectives

Websites have become the main information source, being a crucial element of our daily life and a global network. In this context, the importance of the websites of pharmacy schools is considered not only for their educational mission, but also for their gates to the world. In this study, we evaluated the websites of pharmacy schools based on criteria issued in the literature.

Materials and Methods

Websites of all pharmacy schools in Türkiye were evaluated by scoring the availability of predetermined items, where t-tests and paired t-test were used to compare the groups.

Results

As a result, we found that there is no statistical difference between private and public and accredited or non-accredited schools (p>0.05). Also, we observed no statistical difference between the scores in 2012 and 2021 (p>0.05).

Conclusion

Most pharmacy schools in this study were public, and the accreditation status still seems challenging. Of these 39 schools, only 14 schools are accredited. Total scores of public schools were found to be higher than the private ones and notably, accredited schools have higher scores. Yet, there is no statistically difference between accredited and non-accredited schools or public and private schools. Importance of websites as a communication tool for higher education institutions (HEIs) is indisputable. In conclusion, pharmacy schools should keep up to date with their official websites, considering the virtual world we fell into with the web technologies' developments. Also, further studies should be conducted on the websites of pharmacy schools regarding user demands. Besides we suggest that pharmacy schools' website' quality should be improved and keeping them up to date should be ensured.

Accessibility of university websites worldwide: a systematic literature review

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.

Evaluating the web accessibility of IIT libraries: a study of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and identify the status of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) conformance levels (A, AA, AAA) and accessibility status in terms of Severity (Error, Warning and Review) and Responsibility (Editor, Webmaster and Developer) of Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) Library websites based on Siteimprove Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform.

Design/methodology/approach

The library websites of IITs were tested using Siteimprove web-tool to gather details pertaining to W3C's WCAG 2.1 standards. The data thus obtained were then visualized using spreadsheet software for greater insight. A partial correlation test was also done to assess the relationship between the three conformance levels.

Findings

The study could identify significant accessibility-related limitations of the IIT library websites concerning the three WCAG 2.1 conformance levels A (max IIT Bombay), AA (max IIT Dhanbad (ISM)) and AAA (max IIT Gandhinagar and IIT Varanasi (BHU)), Severity and Responsibility. A positive linear relationship exists amongst these conformance levels. The mean value of conformance levels were found to be 18.3 (A), 2.2 (AA) and 3.1 (AAA); Severity scores were found to be 14.4 (Error), 3.9 (Warning) and 5.2 (Review); and Responsibility scores were found to be 6 (Editor), 9.3 (Webmaster) and 8.3 (Developer), respectively.

Practical implications

The study highlights the comparative picture of accessibility issues and conformance levels of the IITs' library website homepage with the help of results derived/based on Siteimprove Accessibility Checker. The findings of the study reveal that though the library website of IITs' in India possess a well-designed and easily navigable website homepage as far as their accessibility for VIPs is concerned, there are several issues that are still to be resolved.

Social implications

World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) Marrakesh VIP Treaty (MVT) and the W3C's WCAG cater to the requirements and rights of the persons with vision-related disability of accessing information and knowledge building a steeper and deeper knowledge divide. Identifying and rectifying the shortcomings in the library websites will bridge the accessibility-divide and make the society more inclusive.

Originality/value

No previous study could be identified evaluating the accessibility issues of the library website of Indian IITs focussed on vision-disabled persons using Siteimprove. The methodology and approach of this paper have value in terms of reusability and reproducibility facilitating future studies.