Barriers to use: usability and content accessibility on the Web's most popular sites
Abstract
Content accessibility is a key feature in highly usable Web sites, but reports in the popular press typically report that 95% or more of all Web sites are inaccessible to users with disabilities. The present study is a content accessibility compliance audit of 50 of the Web's most popular sites, undertaken to determine if content accessibility can be conceived and reported in continuous, rather than dichotomous, terms. Preliminary results suggest that a meaningful ordinal ranking of content accessibility is not only possible, but also correlates significantly with the results of independent automated usability assessment procedures.
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Eighty percent of Web sites fail to satisfy basic accessibility requirements.
“Research shows that 80% of Web sites do not meet basic accessibility requirements (Loiacono and McCoy, 2004;Sullivan and Matson, 2000;Klein et al., 2003).”
From Understanding Blind Users' Web Accessibility and Usability Problems (2010) · cites this paper as Sullivan and Matson, 2000
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- Authors
- Sullivan, T., & Matson, R.
- Affiliations
- University of North Texas (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings on the 2000 conference on Universal Usability - CUU '00
- Publisher
- ACM Press
- Published
- 2000
- Pages
- 139-144
- OpenAlex
- W2021079758
- Cited by
- 183
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 8 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 7
- FWCI
- 7.71
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Conference on Universal Usability (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Human Factors and Ergonomics › Digital Accessibility for Disabilities
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
- Health Sciences › Health Professions › Occupational Therapy › Assistive Technology in Communication and Mobility
- Keywords
- web accessibility, content accessibility, disabled users, website usability, barriers to use
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