Comparative Evaluuation of the Usability and Accessibility of Selected University Websites

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Abstract University Websites deliver a comfortable and cost-effective way of retrieving students’ information, a more flexible way of communicating with students and staff and is presently the fundamental point of contact along the entire student life cycle. Website design is often driven by its usability and accessibility from the perspective of students in a university but unfortunately, website designers end up developing websites that are not usable, accessible and do not meet the needs of the students. This study comparatively evaluated the usability and accessibility of University websites in Europe with the best University website in Africa. A total of seventeen websites were compared using six automated tools namely Checkmycolours, TAW, WAVE, AChecker, W3C HTML validator and CSS validator to obtain accessibility reports of the websites. Results from the study show that none of the websites conforms to WCAG 2.0 standard. The overall performance shows that most of the evaluated websites are above average. From the analysis, the University of Szczecin, Poland in Europe has the best website among the evaluated universities’ websites. Based on the analysis results, this study proposes the necessary steps that should be taken to further enhance the accessibility of African University websites.

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