Scope
The home pages of 156 UK University web sites and 255 UK colleges of further/higher education have been tested for basic accessibility and/or the presence of an alternative text-only version.
Each home page was tested using an automated accessibility tool called Bobby and checked visually for the existence of an alternative text-only version. It is important to emphasise that the level of accessibility shown is only that determined by Bobby and that no manual checks were carried out.
The Web Accessibility Initiative
Bobby was used to check each site against the guidelines set out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) produced as part of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Each checkpoint in the WCAG is ranked in importance based on three broad levels; priority 1 (single A), priority 2 (double A) and priority 3 (triple A).
For a site to be considered accessible, priority 1 checkpoints must be addressed, priority 2 checkpoints should be addressed, and priority 3 checkpoints may be addressed.
Limitations
In order to understand the scope of this review it is important to be clear on the limitations. Bobby is an automated tool that can only check for certain accessibility problems. It cannot address more subjective checkpoints such as sufficient contrast between foreground and background colours. In such cases the best it can do is flag a potential problem and leave it to the reviewer to make a decision. In the case of this review no such subjective decisions were made. The accessibility of each page is based purely on the automated checks carried out by Bobby. It is therefore likely that the actual level of accessibility of some of the tested sites is lower than that indicated by Bobby.
A second limitation exists in regards to alternative "accessible" versions. Each home page was visually inspected for the existence of an alternative accessible version of the site. While it is impossible to guarantee that every alternative version was found, we point out that if an alternative accessible version is not immediately obvious then it is probably redundant anyway.