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 con-temporary 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.
BT - Universal Access in the Information Society DO - 10.1007/s10209-014-0380-1 IS - 2 LA - eng N1 -This study tested website accessibility of organizations in three industry sectors - tourism, financial and information services. A total number of 89 websites were selected and from each of them, three web pages were chosen to be evaluated using the Total Validator Tool. For those websites with no errors reported, a further manual check was done. Based on the results, managers from both accessible and inaccessible website organizations were approached and interviewed. Results showed that in general, private organizations' websites performed low accessibility. Motives for Web accessibility implementation were reported and classified into economic, social and technical factors.
N2 -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 con-temporary 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.
PB - Springer Berlin Heidelberg PY - 2016 SN - 1020901403 SP - 249 EP - 260 T2 - Universal Access in the Information Society TI - Web accessibility implementation in private sector organizations: Motivations and business impact UR - http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10209-014-0380-1 VL - 15 ER -