Web Accessibility of Palestinian Universities: Can We Access Higher

Education Information during COVID-19?

Iyad Abu Doush

, Mohammed A. Awadallah

and Mohammed Azmi Al-Betar

3,4

Computing Department, American University of Kuwait, Salmiya, Kuwait

Department of Computer Science, Al-Aqsa University, P.O. Box 4051, Gaza, Palestine

Department of Information Technology - MSAI, College of Engineering and Information Technology,

Ajman University, Ajman, U.A.E.

Department of Information Technology, Al-Huson University College,

Al-Balqa Applied University, Al-Huson, Irbid, Jordan

Keywords:

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Universities Web Accessibility, Automatic Accessibility

Evaluation.

Abstract:

University web portals are considered one of the main access gateways for universities. Accessibility of

university online services is a major issue for undergraduate and graduate students with disabilities. Online

registration makes people with disabilities more independent to register courses, add, drop courses, or attend

courses independently. Yet, many people with disabilities in Palestine face major challenges when using uni-

versity websites. In order to understand the issues that face people with disabilities when they use websites

of Palestinian universities, this study evaluates the accessibility of the home pages of these universities during

COVID-19. In order to evaluate partially the accessibility of Palestinian universities during COVID-19, we ap-

ply automatic evaluation on all homepages of eighteen Palestinian universities. The most violated guideline is

empty link which is related to success criterion 2.4.4 Link Purpose. The second highest violated error is linked

image missing alternative text which is related to the success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content. The obtained

results show that all the universities websites are not conforming to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

(WCAG) 2.0 level A.

1 INTRODUCTION

According to the world health organization (WHO),

15% of the world population lives with some form

of disability. People with disabilities attend univer-

sities to improve their skills and this can assist them

to enter the job market and be ﬁnancially indepen-

dent (Fichten et al., 2003). One of the obstacles that

encounter students with disabilities is the inability to

access the web site of the university because it does

not conform to the accessibility standards (Ali et al.,

2019). The university student can use the university

website to apply for the university, read information,

access the registration, search the library, and access

the online learning system. Therefore, it is very cru-

cial for people with disabilities to access all the infor-

mation provided by the university website (Ali et al.,

2019).

Web accessibility means providing the content on

the web for all the people and that the content can be

accessed by automatic tools including assistive tech-

nologies used by people with disabilities (Abu-Doush

et al., 2013). The ultimate purpose is to have an in-

clusive web which can be accessed by all people along

with people with disabilities (Paris, 2006).

In 2008 the United Nations Convention on the

Rights of Disabled Persons established a law that en-

courages governments to guarantee the accessibility

of physical environment and technologies. This was

used by several countries to update their laws to have

a commitment to ensure the accessibility of technol-

ogy and the physical environment.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an in-

ternational organization that places speciﬁcations and

rules for the web. The Web Contents Accessibility

Guidelines (WCAG) (wca, ) are certain rules pro-

vided by W3C which can be used by web developers

to ensure the accessibility of websites by all people

including people with disabilities. These guidelines

provided by W3C are called.

196

Doush, I., Awadallah, M. and Al-Betar, M.

Web Accessibility of Palestinian Universities: Can We Access Higher Education Information during COVID-19?.

DOI: 10.5220/0010146601960201

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications (CHIRA 2020), pages 196-201

ISBN: 978-989-758-480-0

This paper evaluates partially the accessibility of

the homepage of eighteen Palestinian universities us-

ing two automatic tools. The evaluation results can

help in highlighting the commonly violated WCAG

2.0 in Palestinian universities. This can help in rais-

ing the awareness of implementing these guidelines

in Palestinian universities and in higher education in

general.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: The

background is presented in Section 2. The methodol-

ogy is described in Section 3. Section 4 provide the

results and discussions. Finally, the conclusion and

some future directions are drawn in Section 5.

2 BACKGROUND

The web accessibility evaluation can be conducted

normally using experts’ reviews, automatic tools, and

user testing (Doush and AlMeraj, 2019).

Much research work has been conducted to eval-

uate the accessibility of web sites that provide differ-

ent services for users. In this section, we will present

some relevant research that investigated the web ac-

cessibility of universities websites.

Ismail and Kuppusamy (Ismail and Kuppusamy,

2018) conducted a study to evaluate the accessibil-

ity of Indian universities website homepages. Two

automatic tools (AChecker and WAVE) are used for

evaluating the homepages of 302 Indian universities.

The WCAG 2.0 guidelines are used. The study out-

come points out that 73% of homepages are either

medium or high accessibility. Another study by the

same authors (Ismail and Kuppusamy, 2019) evalu-

ate the web accessibility of college websites that are

afﬁliated with the University of Kashmir and Clus-

ter University Srinagar. The study used two auto-

matic evaluation tools web accessibility test (TAW)

and the accessibility engine powering browser exten-

sions (aXe). Both tools indicate many violations of

the success criteria of WCAG.

Some researchers provide recommendations to

enhance universities’ website accessibility. For ex-

ample, Hackett and Parmanto (Hackett and Parmanto,

2005) report that not providing alternative text for im-

ages and image map hotspots is the most violated

WCAG success criteria.

Some studies investigate the web accessibility sta-

tus in universities in some Middle Eastern countries.

A study investigated the web accessibility of uni-

versities in Saudia Arabia for the period 2009 and

2017 (Akram and Sulaiman, 2017). The study out-

come shows that none of the universities conform to

WCAG 2.0. In another Study, 15 web developers and

web researchers from 9 Saudi universities interviewed

to identify the challenges to conform to WCAG 2.0

(Alayed et al., 2016). The main challenges discov-

ered are not involving people with disabilities in web

development, unavailability of clear instructions for

university website accessibility, and insufﬁcient web

accessibility training for developers.

Providing accessible physical environments and

technologies for people with disabilities is crucial in

higher education. Alsalem and Abu Doush (Alsalem

and Doush, 2018) investigated how accessible are the

physical environments and technologies in the univer-

sities and colleges in Jordan for students with disabili-

ties. Questionnaires are used to poll staff of computer

laboratories and libraries in addition to web develop-

ers and e-learning staff. The study results show the

lack of assistive technologies in computer labs and li-

braries. Also, two experts evaluated the universities

websites and found that there is no agreement with

WCAG 2.0.

A limited number of studies explore the acces-

sibility of other e-services provided by universities.

Emad et al. (Ali et al., 2019) evaluated the online

registration system in two of the largest universities

in Jordan. Visually impaired students performed dif-

ferent tasks to register the classes online. The results

of the study show that the visually impaired students

were not able to complete many of the tasks because

the online registration website does not conform with

WCAG 2.0. The ﬁrst main barrier for most students

was that the screen reader reads only numbers in the

table boxes and other boxes on the web page with-

out mentioning what are these numbers represent (i.e.,

”Meaningful sequence”). This is because tables are

not presented in the correct sequence. The second

main barrier is the high number of needed tabs, more

than 20 tabs are needed by the users, and no ‘skip to

content’ link is provided.

Kurt (Kurt, 2017) performs a longitude study

to evaluate the improvement of web accessibility in

Turkish universities over the period 2010 to 2015.

The outcome of the study shows that in general, the

accessibility levels have decreased slightly. The most

violated criteria are missing text alternative for non-

text content.

Hammad et al. (Hammad et al., 2020) investigated

the usability and accessibility of eleven e-learning

portals from eleven countries using three automatic

tools. The used tools are EvalAccess for web acces-

sibility evaluation, Linkchecker to check the usabil-

ity of the website, and Pingdom to check the website

performance based on the load time and the page size.

The study outcome shows that all the tested e-learning

portals do not conform to the WCAG 2.0.

Web Accessibility of Palestinian Universities: Can We Access Higher Education Information during COVID-19?

197

Ismailova and Inal (Ismailova and Inal, 2018)

evaluated the web accessibility of the top universities

in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkey

using automated assessment tools. The majority of

the university websites in the study did not meet the

WCAG 2.0 accessibility criteria. Only two Kyrgyz

and two Kazakh university websites attained confor-

mance level A. The study outcome point out the im-

portance of improving the accessibility of these web-

sites.

Kamal et al. (Kamal et al., 2016) evaluate web

accessibility for 36 Jordanian universities and educa-

tional institutes using seven automatic tools. The re-

sults show a weakness in applying the WCAG on all

the tested websites.

Hassouna et al. (Hassouna et al., 2017) investi-

gated in 2017 the web accessibility problems on 15

Palestinian university websites using WCAG guide-

lines to design accessible web page prototype. The

opinion of 16 blind users’ is polled using an online

questionnaire to identify the features of the prototype.

The developed prototype is then validated by the blind

user’s. The evaluation shows that the developed pro-

totype is highly accessible (mean score 4.19).

3 METHODOLOGY

All the Palestinian universities listed in the ministry of

higher education website

are evaluated in this study

as shown in Table 1. The homepage of the website is

tested as it is the ﬁrst door to enter all other pages and

services of the website.

Table 1: The abbreviations of the studied universities.

Abb. University Homepage

AAU Arab American University https://www.aaup.edu/

ANU An-Najah National University https://www.najah.edu/ar/

AQU Al-Aqsa University https://www.alaqsa.edu.ps/ar/home/

AZU Al-Azher University http://www.alazhar.edu.ps/

BU Bethlehem University https://www.bethlehem.edu/

BZU Birzeit University http://www.birzeit.edu/

GU Gaza University http://www.gu.edu.ps/

HU Hebron University https://www.hebron.edu/

IU Israa University https://ar.israa.edu.ps/

IUG The Islamic University of Gaza http://www.iugaza.edu.ps/

PPU Palestine Polytechnic University https://www.ppu.edu/p/ar

PTU Palestine Technical University https://ptuk.edu.ps/

QOU Al-Quds Open University https://www.qou.edu/

QU Al-Quds University https://www.alquds.edu/ar/

UP University of Palestine https://up.edu.ps/ar/

The web accessibility of these websites is evalu-

ated using two automatic tools. We use two evalua-

tion tools as different tools can capture different vi-

http://www.mohe.pna.ps/Higher-Education/

Institutions/Universities

olations. We selected the top two automatic evalu-

ation tools in terms of the correctly identiﬁed prob-

lems according to (Abduganiev, 2017) which are EIII

Checker

and WAVE

. Both tools check the website

conformance against WCAG 2.0 Level A success cri-

teria. The EIII Checker tool provides an accessibility

score of the evaluated website based on the number of

problems on the website.

WAVE evaluation tool returns the following sum-

mary about the tested web page Errors, contrast er-

rors, alerts, features, structural elements, and ARIA.

As we are interested in WCAG we present only these

errors.

Also, we tested the mobile-friendliness of univer-

sity Web sites using Google mobile-friendly test

Note that we use only automatic tools which is con-

sidered a partial check of web accessibility because of

the need of expert evaluation or user evaluation to ob-

tain all the accessibility issues that cannot be detected

by automatic tools (Doush and AlMeraj, 2019).

4 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

The results from the WAVE tool show that the uni-

versities with the largest number of errors are ANU

and AAU with 60 and 50 errors respectively. The uni-

versities with the smallest number of errors are AZU

and PTU with 11 errors for both of them. The most

violated guideline is empty link which happened 158

times. This violation is related to success criterion

2.4.4 Link Purpose. The second highest violated er-

ror is linked image missing alternative text with 101

times, which is the success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text

Content.

The results from EIII Checker show that the uni-

versities PTU and ANU have the largest number of er-

rors with 80 and 62 errors respectively. On the other

hand, the universities AZU and UP have the small-

est number of errors with 23 and 25 errors respec-

tively. The universities with the highest accessibility

score are QOU and AZU with the rank ﬁrst and sec-

ond. This matches partially the result of the number

of errors as AZU had the smallest number of errors.

While UP had also the second smallest number of er-

rors with 25 errors, but QOU ranked second in acces-

sibility score with 33 errors.

The most violated guideline is use HTML form

controls and links with 163 errors. This is the success

criterion 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value. The next violated

http://checkers.eiii.eu/

https://wave.webaim.org/

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

CHIRA 2020 - 4th International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications

198

Table 2: Wave.

# Error AAU ANU AQU AZU BU BZU GU HU IU IUG PPU PTU QOU QU UP Total

1 Missing alternative text 10 9 1 5 2 14 6 10 57

2 Missing form label 1 4 1 1 14 2 2 1 2 2 1 31

3 Multiple form labels 14 14

4 Empty button 4 6 1 4 1 1 1 18

5 Empty link 13 16 18 4 2 7 20 3 9 11 12 11 14 10 8 158

6 Empty heading 4 2 10 1 4 21

7 Broken skip link 1 1

8 Broken ARIA reference 14 26 40

9 Broken ARIA menu 7 7

10 Linked image missing alternative text 18 20 9 4 3 8 10 14 13 2 101

11 Document language missing 1 1

Total 50 60 36 11 39 41 41 14 10 24 27 11 32 31 22

Table 3: EIII Checker.

# Error AAU ANU AQU AZU BU BZU GU HU IU IUG PPU PTU QOU QU UP Total

1 Accessible name for image links 18 6 9 4 4 2 2 23 9 13 8 2 100

2 Use alt on img elements 1 16 4 9 1 8 8 11 8 14 4 12 96

3 Language of Parts 4 8 2 14

4 Provide descriptive labels 1 4 1 1 14 1 2 2 3 1 2 32

5 Provide descriptive headings 4 2 12 1 4 23

6 Deﬁne ids for elements 3 3 3 6 15 8 1 68 1 108

7 Use HTML form controls and links 17 21 19 4 2 11 18 6 10 9 5 11 14 8 8 163

8 Title attribute to identify controls 1 4 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 16

9 Use a button to identify the purpose of a form control 1 4 1 1 1 1 1 1 11

10 Submit forms without submit buttons 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 10

11 Use the title for frame and iframe elements 4 1 1 1 1 3 2 1 14

12 Use of pointing-device-speciﬁc only event handlers 1 7 2 10

13 Primary language of page 1 1

14 Label groups of form elements 1 1

Total 46 62 40 23 47 30 47 31 35 42 30 80 33 28 25

Score (100) 86.66 90.53 87.75 92.57 75.96 88.05 80.51 76.95 93.72 78.39 83.48 92.03 95.47 87.69 76.68

Web Accessibility of Palestinian Universities: Can We Access Higher Education Information during COVID-19?

199

Table 4: Results of the Google mobile-friendly test.

University Mobile friendly

AAU P

ANU P

AQU F

AZU F

BU F

BZU P

GU P

HU F

IU P

IUG P

PPU P

PTU P

QOU P

QU P

UP P

guideline is deﬁne ids for elements with 108 errors

which is the success criterion 4.1.1 Parsing. The third

most violated guideline is accessible name for image

links with 100 errors which is the success criterion

4.1.2 Name, Role, Value. The provided explanation

is based on the EIII Checker tool test demonstration

The ﬁndings suggest an urgent need to improve

the accessibility of the Palestinian universities web-

sites. They reveal that a large number of homepages

are inaccessible. Violations of the WCAG 2.0 suc-

cess criteria include non-text content, link purpose (in

context), and name, role, value.

Table 4 presents the evaluation results of Google

mobile-friendly test. Four out of ﬁfteen university

sites homepages pass the test. This shows that 27%

of the universities home pages have some accessibil-

ity problems for mobile device users.

5 CONCLUSION

In this study, we evaluate the accessibility of eigh-

teen Palestinian universities against WCAG 2.0 level

A during COVID-19. The study uses two of the top-

recommended automatic tools by the state-of-the-art

to evaluate the web accessibility of home pages of

these universities.

The overall results show that most of the eval-

uated Palestinian universities websites lack accessi-

bility. Unfortunately, none of the universities home-

pages were conformance to the WCAG 2.0 level A.

The commonly failed accessibility success criteria are

”1.1.1 non-text content”, ”2.4.4 link purpose” and

”4.1.2 name, role, value”.

http://checkers.eiii.eu/en/tests/

There is a need to further develop appropriate

policies and laws and set a national-level plan to en-

force the adoption of the national accessibility guide-

lines and WCAG standards for better inclusion of all

citizens when they use higher education.

In the future, we can involve users with disabilities

in the testing and we can use task-based evaluation

by asking users to do common tasks that is done by

students in higher education.

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