Feature Density and Digital Inclusion: An Accessibility Burden Analysis of Indian Academic Library Websites

Over the last 10 years, the academic library websites in India have increased their functional complexity significantly, but there is scanty systematic evidence of whether such expansion has led to more inaccessibility of the websites to users with disabilities. The research question on whether the level of feature density, structural complexity and ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Application) implementation had any relationship with accessibility in 100 academic library websites that were selected based on four categories of administrations: Central, Deemed, Private and State Universities. Based on accessibility audit data produced by the WAVE evaluation tool, the study suggests and implements the Accessibility Burden Index (ABI)- composite index, that represents the ratio of the number of accessibility problems accrued by a website to the positive accessibility infrastructure. ABI aims at detecting the obscure exclusion risks that cannot be captured by raw error counts. Results show that the central University has the greatest burden of accessibility (ABI= 2.11) which classifies them as very high burden and Deemed Universities have the best results among the four categories (ABI=1.02), which proves that the burden of accessibility is still high in all the types of institution. Correlation analysis demonstrates that confirmed errors (r=0.89) and alerts (r=0.79) are the most important predictors of ABI as the volume of ARIA implementation has only a weak negative relationship (r=0.18), indicating that high ARIA counts may not be a sign of real accessibility investment, but interface complexity. The paper adds the ABI as a novel analytic tool in the study of accessibility to libraries and information science and suggests its usage in the institutional accreditation models.