A longitudinal study of website accessibility: Have social work education websites become more accessible?

Abstract

This study (N = 45 schools) sought to determine the accessibility of baccalaureate social work program websites in 2003 and 2008 using Priority 1 checkpoints from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 1.0 guidelines. Paired t-test results indicate that the mean accessibility scores of five of the nine items (plus the website accessibility scale as a whole) was statistically higher after five years. However, 75.6% of programs still had one or more Priority 1 accessibility barriers in 2008 and thus did not meet the lowest W3C accessibility guidelines. This highlights the need for more education about barriers to accessibility and methods for making websites more accessible.