The Accessibility of Museum Web Sites: Results From An English Investigation And International Comparisons

Publication Type  Conference Paper
Year of Publication  2005
Authors  Weisen, Marcus; King, Neil; Petrie, Helen
Conference Name  Museums and the Web 2005: Proceedings
Conference Start Date  April 13 - April
Publisher  Archives & Museum Informatics
Conference Location  Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Editor  Jennifer Trant and David Bearman
Keywords  Web accessibility; automated Web site testing; user testing; standards compliance; e-government policies; disability legislation
Abstract  

Museums, like many other organizations, now use the Web to interact with their audiences. Thus the accessibility of museum websites is as important as the accessibility of their premises and services. This paper presents the results of an audit of 125 museum websites, 100 in England and a group of 25 museums from around the world as a comparison group. The technical accessibility of the websites was assessed against the WCAG1 checkpoints using the accessibility tool WebXM(tm). In addition, the extent to which disabled people could use the websites was assessed by a panel of 15 people with disabilities (5 blind people, 5 partially sighted people and 5 people with dyslexia) who undertook two simple tasks on each website and rated the site on a number of dimensions. The results of the automated testing showed that only 30% of English museum websites and 20% of the international group could meet even the most basic accessibility criteria. The user testing showed that disabled people could successfully complete very basic tasks on the websites only 76.2% of the time and got lost on over one third of the sites. However, further analyses showed that these problems were originating from a relatively small number of accessibility issues that are not especially complex to address.

URL  http://www.archimuse.com/mw2005/papers/petrie/petrie.html

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