Evaluation of Accessibility for the Visually Impaired- The Case of Higher Education Institutions' Websites in Ghana.

Globally, the use of web-based resources has increased tremendously among Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Most HEIs have websites which serve as a virtual gateway to accessing information and services for students. As a result, the demand for website accessibility in HEIs continues to upsurge. The accessibility of a website means that everyone regardless of disabilities can perceive, understand and interact with the website. While web-based resources of HEIs offer convenience for most students; those with disabilities risk being excluded particularly the visually impaired who use assistive technologies if websites are not designed to be technically accessible. Yet web accessibility is under-explored in Ghana. In this study, we evaluate the accessibility of 15 HEIs’ websites in Ghana to determine their adherence to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  The findings show that none of the websites examined conform to the acceptable web accessibility level of compliance. The results indicate that most HEIs websites were not perceivable and operable hence the visually impaired would experience barriers accessing them. The results also identified critical accessibility errors on the websites. We suggest guidelines to address these critical errors and develop a prototype of an accessible website. This study, therefore, raises awareness about web accessibility in Ghana and provides some recommendations to improve web accessibility for the visually impaired and persons with disabilities at large in the web-learning environment.