Web Accessibility of African Ministries of Health Before and After COVID-19: A Comparative Approach
Pastor Nso-Mangue, Sergio Luján-Mora
Proceedings of 19th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI 2024), p. 369-381: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 1752, Salamanca (Spain), June 25-28 2024. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-12885-0_33
(CISTI'24)
Congreso internacional / International conference
Resumen
This article presents a study of the accessibility of ministry of health websites in African countries. The COVID-19 pandemic was a wakeup call to improve accessibility of health information services. The lockdown due to COVID-19 made the Web the sole focal point for health information. More than 57,000 public and private health centers were coordinated by central governments in Africa, so the role of ministries of health in disseminating health information became very important. To determine if these ministry of health websites have improved their accessibility since then, a total of 110 websites representing 55 African countries were evaluated against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1. By using two automated web accessibility evaluation tools (AWAETs), MAUVE++ and WAVE, this study evaluates the performance of web accessibility parameters such as accessibility score, accessibility errors, accessibility contrast errors and implementation of Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) for the years 2019 and 2024. The results show that African ministry of health websites have not improved in web accessibility, and some have even deteriorated in performance. Therefore, more efforts need to be made to overcome this situation, to make health information accessible to all and get prepared for emergencies to come.