Abstract:

Accessible design of web services is necessary for people with disabilities to access online services. The European accessibility act (EU directive 2019/882) covers products and services that have been identified as being most important for persons with disabilities, including e-commerce. By enshrining the principles of WCAG in the Web Accessibility Directive, the European Union is officially requiring its member states to abide by WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. These standards set accessibility requirements also for all educational institutions offering e-commerce services around the EU.

The importance of accessibility is even more significant in education system to provide equal opportunities for everyone in a world digitalizing rapidly. The Finnish higher education system contains 14 Universities and 24 Universities of Applied Sciences. While the mission of the Universities is to conduct scientific research and provide education based on it, Universities of Applied Sciences offer more practical education that aims to respond to the needs of the labour market. The aim of this study is to evaluate the current accessibility status of all available e-commerce sites of the Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences.

In this study 15 e-commerce sites owned by Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences were evaluated against the WCAG 2.1 Accessibility Guidelines. Accessibility evaluations were done by using two different automatic evaluation tools: Wave and Axe DevTools Pro. Manual evaluation of selected use cases was done with a laptop computer by using NVDA and JAWS screen readers and keyboard. Mobile accessibility evaluation of the same use cases was done by using Android and IOS smartphones with their native screen readers.

Although severe accessibility issues were found, and none of the tested services fully met the critical accessibility requirements, the findings in this study can be used to help to develop accessibility on the tested sites. The sites that had paid more attention to accessible design and offed more accurate accessibility statements can serve as better examples for others in developing more accessible online services in the future.

Keywords:

Inclusive Design, Universal Design, Web accessibility, Accessibility compliance, WCAG guidelines.