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Electronic doors to education: study of high school website accessibility in Iowa
Author(s) -
Klein David,
Myhill William,
Hansen Linda,
Asby Gary,
Michaelson Susan,
Blanck Peter
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
behavioral sciences and the law
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.649
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1099-0798
pISSN - 0735-3936
DOI - 10.1002/bsl.521
Subject(s) - web accessibility , web page , the internet , world wide web , internet privacy , web accessibility initiative , mandate , title iii , home page , computer science , psychology , web standards , political science , web development , web application security , law
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities in all aspects of daily life, including education, work, and access to places of public accommodations. Increasingly, these antidiscrimination laws are used by persons with disabilities to ensure equal access to e‐commerce, and to private and public Internet websites. To help assess the impact of the anti‐discrimination mandate for educational communities, this study examined 157 website home pages of Iowa public high schools (52% of high schools in Iowa) in terms of their electronic accessibility for persons with disabilities. We predicted that accessibility problems would limit students and others in obtaining information from the web pages as well as limiting ability to navigate to other web pages. Findings show that although many web pages examined included information in accessible formats, none of the home pages met World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for accessibility. The most frequent accessibility problem was lack of alternative text (ALT tags) for graphics. Technical sophistication built into pages was found to reduce accessibility. Implications are discussed for schools and educational institutions, and for laws, policies, and procedures on website accessibility. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.