A Systematic Literature Review to Determine the Web Accessibility Issues in Saudi Arabian University and Government Websites for Disable People

Abstract

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has shown great commitment and support in past 10 years towards the higher education and transformation of manual governmental services to online through web. As a result number of university and e-government websites increased but without following the proper accessibility guidelines. Due to this many disable peoples may not be fully benefited the contents available on university and government websites. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report, there are more than one billion people all over the world facing different kind of disabilities. Almost 720,000 Saudi nationals are disable which is about 4% of total Saudi population. The objective of this study is to review the existing literature to identify the web accessibility issues in Saudi Arabian university and government websites through a systematic literature review. Several scholarly databases were searched for the research studies published on web accessibility evaluation globally and in Saudi Arabia from 2009 to 2017. Only 15 (6 based on Saudi Arabia and 9 global) research articles out of 123 articles fulfilled the selection criteria. Literature review reveals that web accessibility is a global issue and many countries around the world including Saudi Arabia are facing web accessibility challenges. Moreover web accessibility guidelines WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 are not addressing many problems which are faced by user and some guidelines were not effective to avoid the user problems. However, findings in this study open a new dimension in web accessibility to do extensive research to determine the web accessibility criterions/standards in context of Saudi Arabia.