Website accessibility evaluation of central libraries of 20 superior universities associated with Ministry of Science‚ Research‚ and Technology based on worldwide web consortium guidelines (W3C)

The purpose of the study is to determine website accessibility status of central libraries of 20 superior universities associated with Ministry of Science ‚ Research ‚ and Technology based on worldwide web consortium guidelines.

This paper is an applied study using evaluation method in accordance with 15 indices extracted from guidelines of web content accessibility of the consortium. ‚ Accessibility of 20 central libraries’ websites of superior universities associated with Ministry of Science‚ Research‚ and Technology which have gained  1-20 grades due to university ranking of the Ministry‚ have been evaluated by technical method (mechanical – manual) based on indices of the first priority extracted from worldwide web consortium. Mechanical evaluation was performed by EvalAccess 2.0 application and manual evaluation was developed by using the checklist extracted from indices of the first priority of worldwide web consortium guideline.

The data demonstrated that in mechanical evaluation method‚ the central library website and the document center of Gilan University with 19 points and grade 1‚ and the central library Website of Mashhad Ferdosi University with 472 points and grade 18 are the most and the least accessible websites respectively. In manual evaluation the average of websites accessibility is 23%. Totally the accessibility rate of the websites is below 50% that is too far from the desirable outcome. Finally‚ some techniques and suggestions have been offered to improve websites accessibility.

The paper is the second applied study in the field of website accessibility evaluation and the first applied study in the field of Iranian academic websites accessibility evaluation. The study data may develop a global perspective to policy makers to design accessible websites.