Analysis of web accessibility of Ukrainian higher education institutions’ websites

In today’s digital world, website content accessibility for all users, including people with disabilities, is crucial. This paper examines the accessibility of web content on the websites of Ukrainian higher education institutions to assess their compliance with modern standards and requirements. The goal is to identify problematic aspects and develop strategies for improving the accessibility of educational web resources. The study covered data from the main pages of 372 higher education institution websites, whose addresses were obtained from the Unified State Electronic Database on Education (“USEDE”). The built-in accessibility enhancement tools used on these pages were analyzed. The paper also summarizes global experience in regulating web accessibility requirements. The analyzed regulatory documents include Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 in their rules. Automated analysis tools WAVE and Axe were used to assess website compliance with the Guidelines. Results showed that the most common problems were insufficient highlighting of hyperlinks (characteristic of 84.8% of sites, Success criteria (SC) 2.4.4, 4.1.2), insufficient element contrast (84.6%, SC 1.4.3), lack of alternative text for images (42.9%; SC 1.1.1), and non-compliance with markup and semantics requirements. The conclusions present an analysis of the problems identified during the study, along with the authors’ recommendations for addressing them. The analysis results were systematized and published on a specially created web resource. The authors plan to conduct similar studies on an ongoing basis. It is also necessary to pay attention to problems identified when using automatic analysis tools. The Axe tool identified 11.875 cases of element contrast issues, accounting for 24% of the total number of detected problems. However, this figure is not final, as it does not account for the full range of possible color perception violations and overlooks the contrast of elements against backgrounds with non-uniform colors.