Title: Evaluating accessibility conformance of state public health agencies' websites during the COVID-19 pandemic

Authors: Arunkumar Pennathur; Amirmasoud Momenipour; Brandon Murphy; Priyadarshini Pennathur

Addresses: Physical, Information and Cognitive Human Factors Engineering (PIC-HFE) Research Laboratory, Industrial, Manufacturing and Systems Engineering Department, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968-0521, USA ' Department of Engineering Management, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 5500 Wabash Avenue, Terre Haute, Indiana 47903-3920, USA ' Phillips Medisize, 2202 Carmichael Rd., Hudson WI 54016, USA ' Physical, Information and Cognitive Human Factors Engineering (PIC-HFE) Research Laboratory, Industrial, Manufacturing and Systems Engineering Department, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968-0521, USA

Abstract: The goal of our study was to evaluate conformance with accessibility guidelines of homepages and vaccine information pages on public health websites dedicated to COVID-19 information in the US. We used the Web Access Checker tool AChecker to assess the accessibility of 51 public health agency websites in 50 states and Washington, DC. We computed aggregated conformance counts at the guideline level. We evaluated violations of the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines and collated all known WCAG 2.0 problems for each criterion at the A, AA, and AAA levels for each state, for the homepages and vaccine pages separately. The largest number of known violations occurred in meeting the perceivability and operability principles. In particular, problems in providing non-text content, contrast, and text resizing were prevalent. Our evaluation indicates that state public health websites can improve support for non-text content, the use of assistive technologies, contrast, and text resizing.

Keywords: accessibility; conformance; POUR; website evaluation; COVID-19; public health.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHFE.2024.143254

International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics, 2024 Vol.11 No.3, pp.223 - 244

Received: 02 Jan 2024
Accepted: 06 Aug 2024
Published online: 11 Dec 2024 *

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