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Web Accessibility Evaluation of News Websites Using WCAG 2.0

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Author Affiliations

  • 1Jinnah University for Women, 5-C, Nazimabad, PAKISTAN

Res. J. Recent Sci., Volume 3, Issue (1), Pages 7-13, January,2 (2014)

Abstract

Ever since internet is evolving day by day, new technologies and interfaces have been introduced. Now a day’s all the services are available on the web. These advancements encourage disabled users (blind) to access the web content. For this screen readers have been introduces and guidelines have been set to establish the compatibility between both of them. This paper endeavors in guidelines and problems that blind people face when using the News website. A comparative study was done on local and international sites. They were evaluated manually and with web accessibility tools using WCAG 2.0 and found that news sites don’t even meet Level A of WCAG 2.0 and the users are facing problems to access the core features of the site. In this study, an experiment was also conducted with disabled college students and professionals to test the usability of News websites (Local and International) to see how blind users access the News website and what are the problems they face using web with screen readers. The result showed that both have some web content accessibility problems but according to the results it was found that international news sites are more accessible than local sites.

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