Title: Accessing the usability and accessibility of Indian higher education institution's websites

Authors: Gaurav Agrawal; Devendra Kumar; Mayank Singh

Addresses: Uttarakhand Technical University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India ' Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India ' Consilio Research Lab, Tallinn, Estonia

Abstract: The internet has become the most important and easiest tool to access digital information about any organisation. Organisations use websites to show their presence on the World Wide Web and these websites are the first door to the people to acquire information about their organisation. In the developing country like India where digitisation is in the very early phase, the internet is widely used by the students to access the websites of higher education institutions to access information and these websites form the first impression about the college. To cater the need of every section of society, these websites must be universally accessible to normal as well as to disabled people. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the websites of the institution affiliated to Uttarakhand Technical University, Dehradun, India comply with the standards of accessibility and usability. The study is conducted by using the online evaluation tool. The results indicate that all websites have low usability and the websites show low compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2 (WCAG 2.0), the majority of websites have an accessibility problem.

Keywords: web usability; web accessibility; higher education; WCAG 2.0.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAMS.2023.131671

International Journal of Applied Management Science, 2023 Vol.15 No.2, pp.141 - 150

Received: 15 Nov 2019
Accepted: 27 Nov 2020
Published online: 26 Jun 2023 *

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