Abstract
Websites content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) ensure that websites should be perceivable, understandable, navigable, and interactive. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the importance of accessible websites and online content grew throughout the world. Therefore, in this study, we examined COVID-19-related official government websites. This research covered 21 government websites, with 13 websites from European countries and 8 websites from Asian countries, to evaluate their accessibility following WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 guidelines. The overall goal of this study was to identify the frequent accessibility problems that might help the website owners to identify the shortcomings of their websites. The target websites were evaluated in two steps: in step-1, evaluation was performed through four automatic web accessibility testing tools such as Mauve++, Nibbler, WAVE, and WEB accessibility tools; in step-2, evaluation went through human observation, such as system usability testing and expert testing. The automatic evaluation results showed that few of the websites were accessible; a significant number of websites were not accessible for people with disabilities. In addition, system usability testing found some complexity in website organization, short explanations, and outdated information. The expert testing suggested improving the color of the websites, organization of links, buttons, and font size. This study might be helpful for associated authorities to improve the quality of the websites in the future.
Highlights
The world wide web (WWW) was designed in 1989 to make information accessible to people [1]
In this study, we tested official government COVID-19 vaccine information portals from various countries in Europe and Asia
Official government websites were valuable, reliable, and trusted sources for COVID-19 vaccine information for people, including those with disabilities. Compliance checking of these COVID19 vaccine information portals against the Websites content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) standards is crucial to make the web accessible and understandable for both people with special needs and non-disabled users
Summary
The world wide web (WWW) was designed in 1989 to make information accessible to people [1]. The website is a digital platform for sharing a variety of information (healthcare, education, e-commerce, etc.) with the people. Sometimes, these digital resources are not properly organized (such as the presence of broken links, out-of-date content, dilated images, etc.). To ensure accessible digital services, it is important to ensure that people with disabilities are considered Their needs should be incorporated in the design and implementation of the web application. Four web accessibility evaluation techniques are more popular and effective: automatic evaluation tools [24], manual evaluation or expert evaluation [25], user evaluation (those who have disabilities) [26], and hybrid evaluation (both automatic and manual judgment). Sometimes, automated tools cannot determine all the accessibility issues according to the accessibility guidelines and, require human judgments
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