Accessibility evaluation of Arabic University websites for compliance with success criteria of WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0

Content and services provided by a website should be accessible equally by all users including people with disabilities. Saudi Arabian universities are gradually shifting from traditional classroom teaching to online web-based teaching with the help of learning management systems (LMS). Transformation from traditional teaching system to online teaching systems demands that university website should be accessible by all users regardless of any disability. In this study, accessibility features of the Arabic version of thirty-three Saudi public and private universities are evaluated against thirty-eight success criteria of existing web content accessibility guidelines by using two automatic web accessibility evaluation tools (AChecker and TAW) to ensure that disabled users are able to perceive, understand, navigate and interact with the webpages. Accessibility violations detected by AChecker are categorized into 11% known problems and 89% likely and potential problems. Similarly, accessibility violations detected by TAW are categorized into 26% accessibility problems and 74% warnings. Accessibility evaluation results show that known accessibility problems detected by AChecker and TAW require immediate action to resolve but likely problems, potential problems and warnings require human involvement in the accessibility evaluation process. In this study, we proposed the alignment of detected accessibility violations with the WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 success criteria, which will be helpful to further identify the coverage level of automatic accessibility evaluation tool and main accessibility violation domain. Study concludes that automated web accessibility analysis tools are not alone capable to identify all accessibility issues in website due to the fact that they do not understand the way assistive technologies used by disabled persons to interact with web contents. However, the findings of this study recommend further comprehensive empirical research by involving the disabled users to discover the missing accessibility problems in Arabic version of websites. Furthermore, accessibility problems detected by disabled users' further require aligning by accessibility experts with existing guidelines to identify the gap with user problems and existing web content accessibility guidelines.

Automated summary

This study evaluates the accessibility of Arabic version websites of thirty-three Saudi universities and finds known and potential accessibility issues. The research also suggests that automated evaluation tools are not sufficient and involving disabled users in further research is recommended.