Abstract
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has shown great commitment and support in past 10 years towards the higher education and transformation of manual governmental services to online through web. As a result number of university and e-government websites increased but without following the proper accessibility guidelines. Due to this many disable peoples may not be fully benefited the contents available on university and government websites. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report, there are more than one billion people all over the world facing different kind of disabilities. Almost 720,000 Saudi nationals are disable which is about 4% of total Saudi population. The objective of this study is to review the existing literature to identify the web accessibility issues in Saudi Arabian university and government websites through a systematic literature review. Several scholarly databases were searched for the research studies published on web accessibility evaluation globally and in Saudi Arabia from 2009 to 2017. Only 15 (6 based on Saudi Arabia and 9 global) research articles out of 123 articles fulfilled the selection criteria. Literature review reveals that web accessibility is a global issue and many countries around the world including Saudi Arabia are facing web accessibility challenges. Moreover web accessibility guidelines WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 are not addressing many problems which are faced by user and some guidelines were not effective to avoid the user problems. However, findings in this study open a new dimension in web accessibility to do extensive research to determine the web accessibility criterions/standards in context of Saudi Arabia.
Highlights
Websites play a vital role to get the information in different fields of life such as, education, employment, government, commerce, health care etc
According to the report published on disability by the World Health Organization (WHO), there are more than one billion people worldwide live with different kinds of disabilities [1]
Analysis of 15 reviewed articles discloses that web accessibility is a global issue and mostly countries including Saudi Arabia is not properly following the guidelines provided by the World Wide Web consortium
Summary
Websites play a vital role to get the information in different fields of life such as, education, employment, government, commerce, health care etc These websites should be accessible for all users including disable people so that they can utilize all provided services. According to the internet live stats, total numbers of internet users in Saudi Arabia was about 4.7 million in year 2000 (2.2% of total Saudi population) and increased to about 20.8 million in year 2016 (64.7% of total Saudi population) [12] These users are mainly divided into following four main categories 1) users using e-government services 2) user using university websites 3) user doing online shopping 4) user using social websites.
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