Web Accessibility Evaluation of Videos Published on YouTube by Worldwide Top-Ranking Universities

Abstract

Video consumption on the web has increased markedly in recent years. Universities use videos in different teaching-learning modalities, as well as on their websites, to publish information aimed at their stakeholders. Access to education and information has been recognized as a human right in several international conventions and the constitutions of most countries. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that videos published on the web can be accessed by people with disabilities. The universality of the web is so important that some organizations worldwide have contributed to the development of standards and recommendations focused on web accessibility. Despite these efforts, the rights of millions of people are currently violated, as they are excluded from access to both education and information published on the web. Regarding videos, the reasons are a lack of captions, sign language, audio descriptions, and transcriptions, among others. The objective of this study is to evaluate the accessibility of videos published on YouTube by the best universities in the world based on compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 of the World Wide Web Consortium. We carry out a manual evaluation of 91,421 videos, which were all published on YouTube by 113 universities taken from the Shanghai Ranking. Our purpose is to highlight the urgent need to change the current low level of accessibility that their educational videos show. Consequently, statistical results are presented regarding the compliance with video accessibility according to the regions and positions of the universities in the ranking.