Web Accessibility of Palestinian Universities: Can We Access Higher Education Information during COVID-19?

Iyad Doush, Mohammed Awadallah, Mohammed Al-Betar, Mohammed Al-Betar

2020

Abstract

University web portals are considered one of the main access gateways for universities. Accessibility of university online services is a major issue for undergraduate and graduate students with disabilities. Online registration makes people with disabilities more independent to register courses, add, drop courses, or attend courses independently. Yet, many people with disabilities in Palestine face major challenges when using university websites. In order to understand the issues that face people with disabilities when they use websites of Palestinian universities, this study evaluates the accessibility of the home pages of these universities during COVID-19. In order to evaluate partially the accessibility of Palestinian universities during COVID-19, we apply automatic evaluation on all homepages of eighteen Palestinian universities. The most violated guideline is empty link which is related to success criterion 2.4.4 Link Purpose. The second highest violated error is linked image missing alternative text which is related to the success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content. The obtained results show that all the universities websites are not conforming to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level A.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Doush I., Awadallah M., Al-Betar M. and Al-Betar M. (2020). Web Accessibility of Palestinian Universities: Can We Access Higher Education Information during COVID-19?.In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications - Volume 1: CHIRA, ISBN 978-989-758-480-0, pages 196-201. DOI: 10.5220/0010146601960201

in Bibtex Style

@conference{chira20,
author={Iyad Doush and Mohammed Awadallah and Mohammed Al-Betar and Mohammed Al-Betar},
title={Web Accessibility of Palestinian Universities: Can We Access Higher Education Information during COVID-19?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications - Volume 1: CHIRA,},
year={2020},
pages={196-201},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010146601960201},
isbn={978-989-758-480-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications - Volume 1: CHIRA,
TI - Web Accessibility of Palestinian Universities: Can We Access Higher Education Information during COVID-19?
SN - 978-989-758-480-0
AU - Doush I.
AU - Awadallah M.
AU - Al-Betar M.
AU - Al-Betar M.
PY - 2020
SP - 196
EP - 201
DO - 10.5220/0010146601960201