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Web accessibility implementation in private sector organizations: motivations and business impact

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Abstract

Despite the prominence of the World Wide Web in people’s everyday lives, most Web presences in private sector organizations still fail to comply with contemporary accessibility standards. As a consequence, a large group of users—i.e., people with impairments—are excluded from accessing these Web presences. In order to explain the managerial rationale, an exploratory case study was conducted in three industry sectors. The results of the analysis shed light on organizations’ motivations to implement or reject Web accessibility standards, reveal positive and negative consequences of implementation, and provide in-depth insights into the determinants for successful and unsuccessful Web accessibility implementation. This study supports organizations in making better decisions on the implementation of Web accessibility.

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Notes

  1. The German speaking countries (i.e., Austria, Germany, and Switzerland) all have issued an Equalization Act from 2002 to 2006. Further examples are Ireland’s Disability Act 2005, Italy’s Stance Acts 2004 and 2013, or the UK Equality Act 2010.

  2. In spite of similarities in limitations, there are still differences between elderly people and young disabled people in coping with these limitations as the elderly may have limited opportunities to learn to compensate. For a rich discussion on web accessibility for older users see a special issue in the Universal Access in the Information Society Journal [4].

  3. Two non-Austrian banking institutions have been added to supplement the evaluation. Both institutions have been BIENE award winners (German web accessibility award).

  4. Errors in other categories were not taken into account for this evaluation.

  5. Manual accessibility checks are crucial as some errors may not be detected automatically (e.g., inappropriate alt-attributes).

  6. Although being aware that there is no accessible system per se, but just more or less accessible systems, for the sake of selection of firms to be approached in order to interview managers a website was considered to be (sufficiently) accessible once it has passed the automated as well as the manual tests.

  7. A minimum number of twelve interviews are recommended for attaining data saturation in purposive samples [13].

  8. An Austrian study on the accessibility of public web sites showed that 94 % out of 68 tested sites fulfilled the WCAG A criteria [23].

  9. Web accessibility quality marks have been issued in some European countries but depend on different criteria and evaluation methodologies. The Euracert label is an attempt to unite these quality marks. For details on web accessibility certification issues, difficulties involved, and possible implementation scenarios see [25].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Studies, University of Vienna, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Marie-Luise Leitner & Christine Strauss

  2. Department of Business Administration and Economics, Bielefeld University, Universitaetsstr. 25, 33615, Bielefeld, Germany

    Christian Stummer

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  1. Marie-Luise Leitner
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  2. Christine Strauss
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Correspondence to Marie-Luise Leitner.

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Leitner, ML., Strauss, C. & Stummer, C. Web accessibility implementation in private sector organizations: motivations and business impact. Univ Access Inf Soc 15, 249–260 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-014-0380-1

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