Türkiye'deki Bakanlık İnternet Sitelerinin Erişilebilirliği: WCAG 2.1 Kullanılarak Bir Değerlendirme

Abstract

Considering the substantial proportion of people with disabilities in the society, it is one of the indispensable responsibilities of the society that these people have equal access to information with other people. This situation imposes a serious responsibility on the people who work on the websites. Because the Internet is rapidly moving towards becoming the primary way of information sharing over time. In order to make information on the Internet equally available for everyone and eliminate accessibility problems, governments and private organizations have published some design standards. One of these standards is the WCAG instructions published by World Web Consortium (W3C). WCAG, which has been updated with new version releases over the years, offers solutions by pointing out the design flaws that cause accessibility problems on the websites. WCAG, which consists of design rules to be executed article by article, is followed as a standard by many countries and institutions. The latest version, WCAG 2.1, the last officially published version, consists of 78 items of success criteria. Each item in question has a compliance level. These compliance levels are designated as "A", "AA" and "AAA". Level “A” indicates minimum level, level “AA” intermediate level, and level “AAA” indicates items that must be met for maximum eligibility. While in an ideal world all websites would be expected to be equally accessible to everyone, this responsibility becomes more important for certain categories of websites. Websites of public institutions, which are responsible for providing equal service to everyone, are one of these categories. This study examines the websites of the ministries, which are public institutions in our country, from the accessibility perspective. In the study, basically, it is aimed to create an awareness on the current accessibility situation and the websites of the ministries in our country are evaluated on the basis of WCAG 2.1 success criteria. To achieve these goals; for all ministry websites, target addresses were determined by using manual and automated methods, tests were applied with manual method on each WCAG 2.1 item and their satisfaction status was determined. Result score tables were obtained in which the suitability levels of the items were also taken into account. In the score tables obtained, it was observed that each of the ministries’ websites was below 35 out of 100 points. Observed fundamental accessibility problems are explained and solutions suggestions are made.