“Empirical Study for the website of India’s Central and State Universities “;
Empirical Study for the website of India’s Central and State Universities
On Usability and Content Accessibility metrics
Abstract
Websites are excellent means of information dissemination and visibility, so government around world uses web as primary medium for public information announcement. Current websites are meant for general user and requirements of users such visual, hearing, cognitive and motor impaired are not considered. Web accessibility is way to study the
In this work we have analysed the web sites of universities of India under different categories based on the WCAG 2.0 recommendations and also analysed the performance of usability of websites. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the accessibility and usability report of web sites so that improvements can be made in order to make them more accessible and usable.
Introduction
To make computer technology accessible to people with disabilities, companies provide specialized human computer interface devices (e.g. special mouse for people of age that have difficulty in motor movements, special magnification for monitors, special keyboards). However, although being able to interact with a computer is a necessary prerequisite to using the WWW, the web provides unique features (dynamic content, heavily graphical user interfaces, complicated navigation structures) that often make accessibility a more complicated challenge.
Definition of Web accessibility and universal Design
Many people have been advocating a universal design strategy when designing web interfaces. Universal design refers to the design of products and environments that are usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for case-by-case accommodation. If you adopt universal design when developing WWW pages, your pages will be more readily accessible to most people with disabilities who are already using computers (Laux, 1988).
Chuck Letoumeau (2001) defines web accessibility to mean that “anyone using any kind of web browsing technology must be able to visit any site and get a full and complete understanding of the information as well as have the full and complete ability to interact with the site if that is necessary”.
What is Accessibility?
The e-Accessibility Toolkit for Policy Makers defines accessibility as a measure of the extent to which a product or service can be used by a person with a disability as effectively as it can be used by a person without that disability. Depending upon the extent to which a product or service can be used by a person with a disability; it may be classified as completely inaccessible, partially accessible or fully accessible. Persons with different disabilities have different needs for accessing a technology. Keeping these different needs in mind, accessibility guidelines or standards have been formulated for different technologies to ensure that the product or service is accessible to all persons in one way or another. In the case of websites, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 formulated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the universally accepted standard. Governments around the world, including India have based their accessibility policies on this standard. Key accessibility principles of WCAG 2.0 are given below:
Perceivable: All content, including information in text, multimedia, video and audio must be presented to users in ways they can perceive. This includes giving textual description for non-text objects (image, audio, etc), separating structure and information from presentation, ensuring that there is sufficient colour contrast between foreground and background and having synchronized alternatives (such as captions for videos) for multimedia.
Operable: User interface components and navigation must be operable, i.e., all functionality must be accessible with the mouse as well as the keyboard and there must be standard mechanisms in place such as marking various subsections with HTML headings (h1…h6) to aid users to find and work with content.
Understandable: Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable. i.e., pages should be simple and predictable, with help for clarification.
Robustness: Content must be robust enough to enable it to be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies. i.e., web content should be properly marked up and there should be no HTML and CSS validation errors.
Universities and Web accessibility
Usability and Accessibility Mandates, Guidelines and Tools
The Guidelines for Indian Government websites was formulated by the National Informatics Centre with a view to improving the quality of information and services through electronic media and to enhance government-citizen interaction. Unfortunately, only a miniscule percentage of government departments and agencies have implemented these guidelines, thus leaving the majority of government presence on the internet still unavailable to the larger section of the Indian population.
Methodology
Data Collection Method and Analysis
Firstly collect the state wise list of state as well as central universities of India from UGC website. After that using online tool import.io to extract information and URL of websites state wise. This also gives how many number of government universities are present in the particular state at particular time. The list of websites to be tested has been obtained from the directory of government websites by magic import.io tool. The test was carried out using a combination of automated tools and preliminary manual evaluation.
Preliminary manual evaluation is necessary to supplement the results of the automated test and provide a more qualitative analysis of the accessibility and usability issues encountered.
In the present case, the automated tool was used to test the home pages of all the websites and was followed up by manual evaluation to test for issues like form accessibility.
The tool used for the automated testing was an open source web accessibility evaluation tool called AChecker, which offers the facility to review accessibility of web pages based on a variety of international accessibility guidelines.
Manual testing was done wherever human intervention was required to make decisions on potential problems which could not be identified by automated tools. For example, any check to determine whether linked text correctly describes the purpose of a link, or the textual description of an image is accurate required human decision. The purpose of this test was to check for basic accessibility of these websites and the testers involved in this endeavour were all persons with disabilities having different levels of experience in the use of computers, demonstrating also that inaccessible websites affect both beginners as well as advanced computer users alike.
Two datasets have been considered to evaluate the websites. The first dataset comprises the errors identified by the automated tool. These errors are known errors, likely errors, probable errors, HTML validation errors and CSS validation errors. The second dataset was arrived at through manual evaluation. This includes alternate text for non-text objects, colour change option, navigation mark up and form accessibility.
A brief explanation of these errors is given below:
1. Known problems: These are problems which AChecker knows with certainty are accessibility barriers.
2. Likely problems: These are problems which AChecker has identified as probably barriers, but cannot be sure and require human decision.
3. Potential problems: These are problems that AChecker cannot identify and require human decision.
4. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) Validation: Conformance to HTML standards is important to enable assistive technology to process the pages and present them to the end user.
5. Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Validation: CSS is the most popular programming language used in website development for the presentation / formatting of content, especially on dynamic pages. It is used to control the text / web object colour, size, attributes, etc., and is necessary to ensure that a webpage appears similar across browsers and devices.
6. Alternate text for non-text objects: All objects such as images, audio and video should have alternate means of access such as through text, captions, etc., to enable persons with different disabilities to access them.
7. Colour change option: This option allows users with low vision or colour blindness to change text colour or text size and optimise the website to suit their vision requirements.
8. Navigation markup: Persons with blindness or persons with motor difficulties need a way to navigate a page in a structured manner. If a webpage doesn‘t have navigation mechanisms such as different heading levels or skip links, etc., keyboard users have to use repeated keystrokes to reach the desired place in the webpage. Such repeated keystrokes can be difficult for persons with motor disabilities as they are unable to use the mouse and can also cause repetitive stress injury for others.
9. Form accessibility: In order for a form to be accessible, each input field such as text entry box, selection and other input fields should be properly labelled in a way so that the label can be programmatically determined. In the absence of this, a screen reader will be unable to specify the input required in an edit/combo box or other fields to the end user.
Results and Discussions
Conclusion
References
Laux, L. (1988). Designing Web Pages and Applications for People with Disabilities. In E. Grose & C. Forsythe (Eds.), Humanfactors and Web development. (pp. 87-95). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers Mahwah NJ USA.
Letourneau, C. (2001) Accessible Web Design – a Definitiion. [On-Line]. Available: http://www.starlingweb.com/webac.htm