Web compliance management: Barrier-free websites just by simply pressing the button? Accessibility and the use of content-management-systems

Abstract

The World Wide Web has become an important instrument of social participation, equal opportunities and self-determination. Especially for disabled people and the elderly, the Internet offers the possibility to take care of their affairs by themselves and to compensate lost mobility to a certain degree. Therefore information on the Internet should be easy to access, easy to use as well as easy to understand. However, disabled people, unpracticed users and the elderly - because of their specific functional limitations and needs - encounter barriers and restrictions in accessing many websites. In order to refresh contents of a website, many software producers have put an effort in developing easy-touse content-management-systems (CMS) which most recently address the topic of accessibility as well. The central aim of the study presented in this paper was to find out whether certain CMSs in fact do offer a technology which allows for an editor to refresh a barrier-free website without special knowledge in accessibility by simply "pressing the button" of a CMS integrated tool, which claims to automatically offer compliance with standard accessibility guidelines. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.