Web Accessibility of Palestinian Universities: Can We Access Higher Education Information during COVID-19?

Iyad Abu Doush, Mohammed A. Awadallah, Mohammed Azmi Al-Betar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

University web portals are considered one of the main access gateways for universities. Accessibility of university online services is a major issue for undergraduate and graduate students with disabilities. Online registration makes people with disabilities more independent to register courses, add, drop courses, or attend courses independently. Yet, many people with disabilities in Palestine face major challenges when using university websites. In order to understand the issues that face people with disabilities when they use websites of Palestinian universities, this study evaluates the accessibility of the home pages of these universities during COVID-19. In order to evaluate partially the accessibility of Palestinian universities during COVID-19, we apply automatic evaluation on all homepages of eighteen Palestinian universities. The most violated guideline is empty link which is related to success criterion 2.4.4 Link Purpose. The second highest violated error is linked image missing alternative text which is related to the success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content. The obtained results show that all the universities websites are not conforming to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level A.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCHIRA 2020 - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications
EditorsAndreas Holzinger, Hugo Placido Silva, Markus Helfert, Larry Constantine
PublisherSciTePress
Pages196-201
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9789897584800
StatePublished - 2020
Event4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications, CHIRA 2020 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 5 Nov 20206 Nov 2020

Publication series

NameCHIRA 2020 - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications

Conference

Conference4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications, CHIRA 2020
CityVirtual, Online
Period5/11/206/11/20

Keywords

  • Automatic accessibility evaluation
  • Universities web accessibility
  • Web content accessibility guidelines (wcag)

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