| 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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