Abstract
Patients with disabilities utilize accommodations or assistive technologies to access content from healthcare websites, but not all websites are built accessibly. We sought to evaluate the accessibility of dermatology home page websites from the 3 largest hospitals in each state of the United States (n = 150) using evaluation tools SortSite 6.42.924.0 and the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE). Of 150 hospitals evaluated, 128 (85%) were teaching hospitals and 48 (32%) were from the southern United States. The average numbers of contrast errors and all other errors detected by WAVE were 13.6 and 8.9, respectively. The mean number of Level A, AA and AAA issues detected per WCAG 2.1 guidelines were 5.7, 1.5, and 2.5, respectively. There were no significant differences in any accessibility metrics between teaching and non-teaching hospitals. Overall, dermatology home page websites have an average of 6 failures to meet the baseline A criteria of WCAG 2.1 and no websites were completely adherent to standards. The mean elements of contrast errors, other errors, alerts, and structural elements issues were all greater in the dermatology websites than in a federal public health website in a global analysis. Inaccessible dermatology websites present a significant barrier for patients to schedule and receive dermatologic care at hospitals nationally and may result in adverse outcomes for this underserved population. Dermatologic care teams and web developers must prioritize improving the accessibility of their websites to benefit all patients.
References
Brobst JL (2012) United States federal health care websites: a multimethod evaluation of website accessibility for individuals with disabilities
Mehta-Ambalal SR, Nisarta M (2021) Dermatology 2.0—how the internet is changing us, our patients and our practice. Indian Dermatol Online J 12(4):593–596. https://doi.org/10.4103/idoj.IDOJ_788_20
Alajarmeh N (2021) Evaluating the accessibility of public health websites: an exploratory cross-country study. Univ Access Inf Soc. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-020-00788-7
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. W3C Recommendation. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/. Accessed January 30,2022.
Kaundinya T, Schroth S (2022) Dismantle ableism, accept disability: making the case for anti-ableism in medical education. J Med Education Curricular Development. 9:6660. https://doi.org/10.1177/23821205221076660
Ali NS, Villalpando BK, Roddy GW, Sartori-Valinotti JC (2021) Clinical practice gap: annual skin cancer screening examinations for visually impaired patients. Int J Dermatol 60(10):e431–e432. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijd.15614
Funding
None.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
TK, KY, and AJW conceptualized project, collected data, wrote manuscript. TK, KY, AJW, CL and WL wrote manuscript and critically revised manuscript. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Conflict of interest
TK declares that she has no conflict of interest. KY declares that he has no conflict of interest. WL declares that he has no conflict of interest. CL declares that he has no conflict of interest. AJW declares that she has no conflict of interest.
Ethical approval
Not required due to using public websites.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kaundinya, T., Yang, K., Lau, W.C. et al. Adherence of dermatology home page websites to accessibility guidelines for persons with disabilities. Arch Dermatol Res 315, 1453–1455 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00403-022-02496-z
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00403-022-02496-z