Web accessibility: a case study

This work focuses on concept of accessibility and its practical implementation online. Web accessibility concerns designing online services in a way that allows them to be used by people of different abilities who make up to 20% of the world population. Enabling them to use online services has moral, business and legal incentives. There are existing guidelines for implementing accessible web services although they are not without their issues. This work shows how accessibility can be applied practically by conducting a case study on the example of Haaga-Helia’s main website. The work evaluates existing accessibility practices and analyses the data produced by the automated accessibility tool currently in use by cross-comparing its results with other tools. In addition, selected pages of the website are tested manually. Manual testing uncovered several significant issues that severely affect user experience and are not detectable by automatic means. Results collected through automated and manual testing show that automated testing works well as a first line of defence and allows to quickly detect and fix some errors but is not enough to create a good user experience by itself. To ensure that the users can achieve their goals, manual testing is the essential part of the process. In addition, recommendations on vendor selection for web services are provided with the focus on accessibility. It is recommended that the vendor proves to be able to utilize automated tools as part of implementation and maintenance to catch easily detectable errors quickly. To add to that, the preferred vendor should also include manual and possible user testing for key user stories as part of their process. Most importantly, the vendor should be able to prove that proposed accessibility solutions will help the users reach their goals