Accessibility of educational websites in Ecuador and Equatorial Guinea: A tale of two countries

Abstract

Web accessibility is essential to guarantee the inclusion of all in an increasingly digitized world. The universities of Ecuador and Equatorial Guinea (EG) make use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to offer various services consumed by members of their community. The web is the main way to interact with these ICT services. Considering functional diversity, the web can serve as a facilitator or become a barrier for people with disabilities when accessing these services. The typical dynamism of websites, especially in the university environment, invites us to carry out periodic evaluations of web accessibility. This work tries to compare the web accessibility of the public universities of Ecuador and EG, countries located in America and Africa, respectively, but that share the same official language (Spanish). In order to achieve the comparison a set of universities were selected from both countries to find out their degree of compliance against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), in its version 2.0. The evaluation was carried out by using three automatic evaluation tools (Siteimprove, Experte and Tingtun Checker). The results, after being analysed by using Tableau Public, showed that the universities of both countries have an acceptable level of web accessibility, although factors like poor information architecture, slow page loading and others were observed, which invite to carry out a usability test in future studies.