Accessibility of Indian universities’ homepages: An exploratory study

Abstract

Websites have evolved into an excellent medium of information dissemination and visibility. Hence governments and organizations around the world have websites as primary medium for information communication. The universal accessibility of this web medium remains a major challenge for both web developers and accessibility researchers. Conformance of WCAG 2.0 guidelines by web pages is a significant factor in measuring universal accessibility. This paper presents an exploratory study about the accessibility of Indian university website homepages. We have analyzed the homepages of 302 Indian universities under different conformance levels of WCAG 2.0 recommendation using automatic accessibility evaluation tools to find accessibility report of websites and then classified them comparatively into three groups namely low accessible websites called Tier-III, medium accessible websites called Tier-II and high accessible websites called Tier-I. Statistical classification and accessibility report of websites shows that an array of further improvements have to be made in order to make them more accessible and usable in terms of WCAG 2.0. Based on the results of the analysis, this paper proposes the necessary steps which shall be taken to further enhance the accessibility of the websites. Keywords: Web accessibility, Indian university websites, Classification, WCAG 2.0, Accessibility computing