The most violated WCAG 1.0 guidelines by the developers of university websites in Turkey

Abstract

Universities utilize the 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 1.0 guidelines by web pages is a significant factor in measuring universal accessibility. This paper focuses on the accessibility evaluation of 23 Turkish University homepages. The accessibility assessment was carried out to verify compliance with the WCAG 1.0 published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The main goal of this study is to determine if even people with disabilities can access and use websites of the universities with higher academic prestige. From the results, we can conclude that the majority of the tested websites do not achieve an acceptable level of compliance. Universities with high academic prestige do not show a greater level of web accessibility. By performing the evaluation of university websites, we have identified that there are major barriers to a large number of users. We identified and discussed the most violated WCAG. Our findings may raise awareness to the web developer about these violations and encourage them on how to build better and accessible websites.