Developing a Framework for Localised Web Accessibility Guidelines for University Websites in Saudi Arabia
This paper presents a new framework for localised web accessibility guidelines for university websites in Saudi Arabia. The main purpose of this framework is to provide the basis for the development of localised guidelines. Applying these localised guidel
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Abstract. This paper presents a new framework for localised web accessibility guidelines for university websites in Saudi Arabia. The main purpose of this framework is to provide the basis for the development of localised guidelines. Applying these localised guidelines on Arabic websites would enhance their accessibility for Arab people with disabilities. The development process of the new framework is described in detail. This process involved three phases, determination, synthesis and specification phases. The proposed framework comprises six main components; web accessibility, genre-specific cultural markers, costs, user diversity, Internet infrastructure and technology variety. Keywords: Web accessibility guidelines Localisation Culture Disability Saudi Arabia University websites
1 Introduction People with disabilities in Saudi Arabia were estimated to be more than 700,000 in 20151 which constitutes over 7 % of Saudi citizens. Among those disabled, there are individuals who have an interest in accessing the content of university websites for different reasons. For instance, to apply for a university degree or to find information about the university and courses. Therefore, there is a pressing need for proper web accessibility guidelines in order not to exclude people with disabilities from obtaining the benefits of accessing university websites [1]. Web accessibility guidelines such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) [2] that are developed in Western countries (North America and Western Europe) are used by some Arabic developers when developing Arabic websites [3]. However, some of the success criteria or the guidelines do not fit all cultures and all languages. Applying the WCAG 2.0 guidelines to Arabic websites would raise more accessibility issues and require different success criteria and possibly even techniques to maintain accessibility levels. This problem has been reported by a number of researchers, as they suggest the importance of adapting the accessibility guidelines to the Arabic context [4, 5, 8]. The current paper seeks to contribute to this body of 1
http://rs.ksu.edu.sa/82739.html http://www.alriyadh.com/104799.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 K. Miesenberger et al. (Eds.): ICCHP 2016, Part I, LNCS 9758, pp. 243–250, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-41264-1_33
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knowledge by developing a new framework to localise accessibility guidelines for university websites in Saudi Arabia. In this paper, related work is discussed in Sect. 2. Section 3 explains the development process of the new framework. The proposed framework with its components is described in Sect. 4. Section 5 concludes with a summary of the paper.
2 Related Work To the best of the researchers’ knowledge and based on the literature review, limited studies on web accessibility of the Arabic websites have been found. The main focus of these studies such as [1, 5–8], is on evaluating web accessibility of e-government websites in a number of Arabic countries. Among those stu
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