Sushmitha Sekar

Web accessibility compliance for University websites: Exemplied by PAUL and PANDA

People with disabilities can find it difficult to access the contents of the web, if the website is not designed properly. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has created Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), an international standard for web accessibility. The guidelines are intended to ensure that all the users of Internet are given an equal opportunity to interact with the contents in it.

This research describes the various techniques to assess the compliance of the university websites and PDFs with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. The study also explores the accessibility issues in the learning management systems, PAUL and PANDA of University of Paderborn, and the digital documents in them using automated and manual testing methodologies. Further, an online survey was conducted to gather the opinion of the students on the accessibility of these websites. The results of the evaluation and survey, show that there are accessibility barriers in the websites and their resources. Finally, the ways to maintain accessibility in a University website and document are discussed in this thesis.