Accessibility of Turkish university Web sites

Abstract

In 2010, the author of this paper conducted an evaluation of the accessibility level of the home pages of Turkish Universities (Kurt in Univers Access Inf Soc 10(1):101---110, 2011). That investigation, which utilized a variety of different evaluative techniques, as recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, found that none of the reviewed home pages met the minimum criteria for Web accessibility. In 2015, the author completed a follow-up audit of the same universities' home pages, using a similar methodological approach. The goal of the audit was to determine whether Web site accessibility had increased or improved during the intervening 5-year period. This paper, which details the results of the second study, demonstrates that in general accessibility levels have actually decreased slightly. Each of the university Web sites reviewed contains at least one of a variety of components that makes it inaccessible to some users. Of these, the most prominent is neglecting to provide equivalent text alternative for content that has been presented in non-text formats, although doing so would be a relatively simple matter.