Lourdes Moreno, Rodrigo Alarcón y Paloma Martínez have presented the article "Accessibility and readability compliance in Spanish public hospital websites" at the 10th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion (DSAI 2022).
According to this study carried out, hospital websites do not obtain good results in web accessibility according to the standards to be met, such as WCAG 2.1.
This research evaluated automatically and manually by experts accessibility the compliance of the main public websites of Spanish hospitals through their home page. The results indicated that no website of the 48 analyzed is accessible according to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and only four websites met WCAG 2.1 level A.
Several more frequent errors were identified such as images without the textual description that cannot be interpreted by screen readers and a lack of information about the purpose of the links. These errors make hospital websites more difficult to access, especially for people with cognitive and visual impairments.
Likewise, the readability values obtained in the texts of the websites of Spanish hospitals were not satisfactory: 33 websites out of the 48 studied presented readability barriers. This indicates that the texts of the web pages of hospitals in Spain are somewhat difficult to understand for most people and citizens.
This article provides information for hospital website developers regarding the importance of adhering to web accessibility guidelines and applying standards in website design, as well as for web content authors in order to make the texts more accessible and legible to all citizens.
REFERENCIA: Lourdes Moreno, Rodrigo Alarcón and Paloma Martínez. (2022) Accessibility and readability compliance in Spanish public hospital websites. 10th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion (DSAI 2022). ACM Digital Library. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563137.3563143