Rendering university websites accessible is the first goal to be accomplished if we are to guarantee information access and a successful educational experience for all university community members. Research evidence suggest, however, that technical accessibility conformance in university websites is considerably low (Kurt, 2019; Seale et al., 2019), with content quality often highlighted as a crucial usability barrier (Yerlikaya and Durdu, 2017).
In Switzerland, there are different laws and standards promoting the design and development of accessible web content, but prior work evaluating the accessibility level of Swiss higher education web portals seems to indicate that they are not always followed (Access for All, 2016; Casalegno, 2018). Interestingly enough, the most recent Swiss accessibility standard, eCH-0059 (Riesch et al., 2020), stipulates that information related to life areas such as education, work, family, housing, leisure, or public services should be translated into alternative means of communication, specifically Easy Language (EL) text and sign language (SL) videos, on a proportional basis.
Within the framework of the UNI-ACCESS project, we have conducted a series of studies to assess text accessibility on a selection of French web pages from the University of Geneva. First, by means of interviews and an online survey, we have consulted different target groups –including migrants and refugees, people with hearing impairments and non-French speaking international students– to identify, among others, which were the current language barriers they face when using university websites. In general, we observed a preference for the use of shorter sentences, as well as a desire to have definitions of difficult concepts and summaries of key information in each page, both in text format and LS.
In a subsequent study, using text excerpts from the same web pages, representatives from the aforementioned target groups were asked to identify terms, expressions or full passages that were difficult to understand. These were then compared to the list of difficult words flagged by aMesure, a tool designed to automatically analyse text complexity. Results indicate that a user-centered strategy could be a better-informed solution to create more accessible text content for university websites.
