Accessibility assessment of selected university websites

The accessibility of websites consists in ensuring the possibility of using the information posted there by all users, especially by disabled people. The aim of the study was to examine the levels of accessibility of websites of Lublin universities and compare them with the websites of two universities in Poland selected for the purpose of the study. With this aim in view, an experiment was developed, which consisted of two parts. In the first part of the experiment, a specially made original checklist was used containing questions about specific functionalities of websites corresponding to important accessibility issues. In the second part, automated tools were used to with a view to assessing the accessibility. The research material consisted of eight websites of universities from Lublin and two websites of universities from other cities in Poland that were compared in the study. Those two universities in contrast to the eight ones additionally had special sets of websites for people with disabilities. Such additional sets of websites specifically designed for the needs of people with disabilities were also included in the research. After conducting the experiment, it was possible to identify the universities which have the best and the worst websites in terms of accessibility results. Furthermore, the study revealed specific pages of these websites that were characterized by the highest and the lowest average accessibility ratings. The results of the expert analysis showed that  the examined university websites do not have an attached declaration of accessibility, contain documents in the PDF format that are not accessible, often do not allow for changes of colour and do not have a mobile version.