Evaluation of Accessibility and Usability of Higher Education Institutions’ Websites of Jordan

Recently, various websites have become a popular means of deriving information. However, users still find it difficult to access the relevant data or use the websites. Hence, they require websites which offer accessible information and easy navigation. In this study, the researchers have investigated the accessibility of the different websites of the Jordanian universities. The researchers determined the accessibility of 30 websites and verified their compliance with the Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) for accessing the web content, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They tested the usability of the Al-Zaytoonah University website as a test study, by interviewing 6 students belonging to the University. They were asked to identify the pages directly, without any assistance or direction, and they were asked to describe the selection processes and assistive techniques that they used. The data was collected from these students for conducting the website usability test. 14 tasks were implemented in this study, like accessing their University webpages, e.g., homepages of the site and access to the e-learning sites from the university homepage. The time required for every task was assessed. Based on this study, the researchers could identify the websites that were error-free. The results indicated that most of the websites were not easily accessible and were difficult to use. Furthermore, when the researchers carried out the test study with the students, their results indicated that the user interface for every webpage needs improvement, rearrangement of the sequence of web links and addition of more tags and information.