engleski

Accessibility of Croatian Public and Private University Websites Home Pages

The provisions of the Act on the Accessibility of Websites and Software Solutions for Mobile Devices of Public Sector Bodies (Official Gazette 17/19, September 23rd, 2019) determine “measures to ensure the accessibility of websites and software solutions for mobile devices of public sector bodies to users, especially persons with disabilities.” The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) require that information or user interface components must be presented to users in such a way that they can perceive them. It is a legal but also a moral obligation of all web content creators which must be fulfilled in order to ensure accessibility to all users. This paper presents an analysis of the website accessibility of Croatian public and private universities with the aim of achieving, improving and promoting web accessibility and digital inclusion. The research sample consists of 9 public and 3 private Croatian universities’ websites home pages. Several tools are used to analyse their accessibility. In the research presented, methods of analysis, experiment, descriptive statistics and synthesis have been used. The results of checking the accessibility of Croatian public and private universities’ websites home pages, classification and ranking of the most common problems regarding web accessibility, i.e. non-compliance with WCAG, and guidelines to improve the accessibility of the web content have been stated. The analysis shows that the most common discrepancies are: lack of alternative descriptions of images, lack of discernible link names and inadequate colour contrast. The authors conclude that it is important to promote web accessibility in order to improve digital inclusion in education and that all stakeholders creating web content or user interface components contribute to this.

Accessibility check tools ; Digital inclusion ; Special needs ; Accessibility improvement ; Higher education

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