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Title:	University website accessibility model for visual impairments users: a case study in Palestine
Authors:	Mohammed Saleh A. S. Hassouna (P73055)
Supervisor:	Noraidah Sahari, Prof. Madya Dr.
Keywords:	Visual impairment University website Palestine Web access Dissertations, Academic -- Malaysia
Issue Date:	14-Jul-2015
Description:	Higher education institutions use their websites to communicate with their stakeholders. University website plays important roles in disseminating information and services. However, inaccessible websites could severely restrict users to interact with them. Web accessibility has become one of the main requirements for designing websites, with the aim of making websites efficient for all users, including those with disabilities. Furthermore, most of the related studies revealed significant weaknesses of web accessibility within universities' websites, especially for visually disabled users. There is a general lack of studies on the web accessibility of universities’ websites in Palestine. Hence, the researcher conducted a preliminary study using the CynthiaSays automatic tool to evaluate the accessibility of 10 Palestinian universities’ homepages. The preliminary study highlighted significant accessibility problems that could create obstacles for the disabled, especially those who are visually impaired. As a result, many users with visual impairment could not access these sites effectively. Consequently, the objective of this research is to develop an accessibility model for visually impaired users by incorporating the latest international guidelines of web accessibility (WCAG 2.0). This research has identified four main principles of accessibility, which are perceivability, understandability, operability, and interactivity and 17 factors of accessibility from the perspective of users with visual impairments. Finally, a prototype was developed and its accessibility was tested to validate the model indirectly. The research used mixed method design to reveal the factors and validate the proposed model. A constructed online accessibility questionnaire with 5-point Likert scale based on the identified accessibility factors. This instrument has been used to evaluate the accessibility of the prototype. As evaluated by 47 visually impaired participants, it was found that the prototype was highly accessible among the totally blind, partially blind, and color blind where the mean scores were 4.19, 4.20, and 4.43 respectively. The regression analysis test was also utilized to find the relationship between the items of the questionnaire and the accessibility main principles. The results showed that there were statistical significant differences between these items. In conclusion, the accessibility model has been developed and indirectly validated by the prototype. The accessibility model could be used to improve the accessibility of universities websites.,Certification of Master's/Doctoral Thesis" is not available
Pages:	117
Publisher:	UKM, Bangi
URI:	https://ptsldigital.ukm.my/jspui/handle/123456789/476350
Appears in Collections:	Faculty of Information Science and Technology / Fakulti Teknologi dan Sains Maklumat

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