ATG Special Report -- Website Accessibility of Public Senior Institutions in South Carolina

Abstract

This study investigates Website accessibility of university home pages in the public senior institutions in the state of South Carolina. The reasons for performing the study are twofold: first, to find the common accessibility problems among the institutions. Second, to find which institution has the highest number of accessibility problems. Thirteen universities were selected to be analyzed by Cynthia Says and Section 508 Accessibility Checking Tool. Each university home page was analyzed by each Web accessibility evaluation tool. The mean for both Cynthia Says and Section 508 Accessibility Checking Tool was 4.15 and the standard deviation of 9.71 and 12.03 respectively. However Cynthia Says found 4 out of 13 websites free of accessibility errors while Section 508 Accessibility Checking Tool found 8 Websites free of accessibility errors. The findings suggest that the different evaluation processes contributed to the difference in the number of university home pages free of accessibility errors. WebEval was used to evaluate the accessibility quality of the significant images. Out of 195 total images 144 (74%) are significant images. Significant images with alt text was 114 (58%) of 195 total images. Challenges remain for university web designers to provide university home pages completely free of accessibility errors. It is hoped that this study can provide insights for individuals developing university home pages. Adapted from the source document.