Assessment of Web Content Accessibility Levels in Spanish Official Online Education Environments
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Title: | Assessment of Web Content Accessibility Levels in Spanish Official Online Education Environments |
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Authors: | Roig-Vila, Rosabel | Ferrández Escámez, Sergio | Ferri Miralles, Immaculada |
Research Group/s: | EDUTIC- ADEI (Educación y Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación- Atención a la Diversidad. Escuela Inclusiva) |
Center, Department or Service: | Universidad de Alicante. Departamento de Didáctica General y Didácticas Específicas |
Keywords: | Accessibility | Disabilities | Educational environment | eLearning | Internet |
Knowledge Area: | Didáctica y Organización Escolar |
Issue Date: | 20-May-2014 |
Publisher: | Canadian Center of Science and Education |
Citation: | International Education Studies. 2014, 7(6): 31-45. doi:10.5539/ies.v7n6p31 |
Abstract: | Diversity-based designing, or the goal of ensuring that web-based information is accessible to as many diverse users as possible, has received growing international acceptance in recent years, with many countries introducing legislation to enforce it. This paper analyses web content accessibility levels in Spanish education portals according to the international guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Additionally, it suggests the calculation of an inaccessibility rate as a tool for measuring the degree of non-compliance with WAI Guidelines 2.0 as well as illustrating the significant gap that separates people with disabilities from digital education environments (with a 7.77% average). A total of twenty-one educational web portals with two different web depth levels (42 sampling units) were assessed for this purpose using the automated analysis tool Web Accessibility Test 2.0 (TAW, for its initials in Spanish). The present study reveals a general trend towards non-compliance with the technical accessibility recommendations issued by the W3C-WAI group (97.62% of the websites examined present mistakes in Level A conformance). Furthermore, despite the increasingly high number of legal and regulatory measures about accessibility, their practical application still remains unsatisfactory. A greater level of involvement must be assumed in order to raise awareness and enhance training efforts towards accessibility in the context of collective Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), since this represents not only a necessity but also an ethical, social, political and legal commitment to be assumed by society. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10045/47218 |
ISSN: | 1913-9020 (Print) | 1913-9039 (Online) |
DOI: | 10.5539/ies.v7n6p31 |
Language: | eng |
Type: | info:eu-repo/semantics/article |
Rights: | Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). |
Peer Review: | si |
Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ies.v7n6p31 |
Appears in Collections: | INV - GIDU-EDUTIC/IN - Artículos de Revistas |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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2014_Roig-Vila_etal_IES.pdf | 532,74 kB | Adobe PDF | Open Preview | |
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