Abstract—Web Accessibility means that websites, tools, and
all technologies are designed in an accessible way for all people
regardless of any disability and other physical limitations. The
number of disabled people is far greater than anyone could
estimate. The importance of online education cannot be ignored
as it can provide access to a range of educational material
available over the internet. There is now much discussion about
the issue of E-accessibility when it comes the to the design and
development of the website and it is becoming a legal
requirement for governmental and public websites to conform
with the standards defined by the world wide web consortium
(W3C), an organization which provides guidelines to maintain
World Wide Web and its standards. Research proved that there
is very little importance given to the issue of E-accessibility for
people with special needs. The aim of this research is therefore
to measure the accessibility level of the educational websites in
the UAE against the standard defined by W3C and to form
recommendations on how to improve and achieve the highest
level of e-accessibility for students with special needs learners as
it provides them easy access to a wider range of educational
material. Enabling a website to meet the needs and
requirements of special students is a concern for all educational
institutions.
Index Terms—E-accessibility, WCAG, W3C, websites,
education, universities, e-learning.
Liaqat Ali is with the Department of Information Technology, College of
Engineering and Information Technology, University of Science and
Technology of Fujairah, P.O. Box: 2202, Fujairah, United Arab Emirates
(e-mail: l.ali@ustf.ac.ae).
Cite: Liaqat Ali, "Accessible Websites for Everyone — A Case of UAE Universities Websites," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 164-170, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).