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Accessibility of Internet websites through time

Published: 01 September 2003 Publication History

Abstract

Using Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a random sample of websites from 1997-2002 were retrospectively analyzed for effects that technology has on accessibility for persons with disabilities and compared to government websites. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Tukey's HSD were used to determine differences among years. Random websites become progressively inaccessible through the years (p<0.0001) [as shown by increasing Web Accessibility Barrier (WAB) scores], while complexity of the websites increased through the years (p<0.0001). Pearson's correlation (r) was performed to correlate accessibility and complexity: r=0.463 (p<0.01). Government websites remain accessible while increasing in complexity: r=0.14 (p<0.041). It is concluded that increasing complexity, oftentimes caused by adding new technology to a Web page, inadvertently contributes to increasing barriers to accessibility for persons with disabilities.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing
ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing Just Accepted
Sept. 2003 - Jan. 2004
192 pages
EISSN:1558-1187
DOI:10.1145/1029014
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    Assets '04: Proceedings of the 6th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
    October 2004
    202 pages
    ISBN:158113911X
    DOI:10.1145/1028630
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 September 2003
Published in SIGACCESS , Issue 77-78

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Author Tags

  1. internet archive
  2. web accessibility
  3. world wide web

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  • (2022)A Systematic Review of Web Accessibility MetricsApp and Website Accessibility Developments and Compliance Strategies10.4018/978-1-7998-7848-3.ch004(77-108)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2022)Twine Screen Reader: A Browser Extension for Improving the Accessibility of Twine Stories for People with Visual ImpairmentsInteractive Storytelling10.1007/978-3-031-22298-6_37(577-589)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2022
  • (2022)Evaluating the Potential Implementation of New Metrics in Automated Web Accessibility Testing Software for ManagersUniversal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Novel Design Approaches and Technologies10.1007/978-3-031-05028-2_2(22-39)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2022
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