Web accessibility in Turkey: awareness, understanding and practices of user experience professionals

Abstract

Ensuring web accessibility for all is not an easy task and requires the awareness, understanding and practices of people with different roles. User experience professionals (UXPs) play an important role in ensuring web accessibility for all. However, in Turkey, there is no research concerning the status of the awareness, understanding and common practices of UXPs. The overall goal of the present work was to offer an assessment of the current situation in Turkey to suggest areas of improvement and changes to advance web accessibility practices. To meet this goal, we conducted an online survey. The results of this survey show that UXPs believe they have enough training and education in web accessibility; however, they are not familiar with web accessibility standards and assistive technologies used by people with disabilities. They do not work with people with disabilities in their studies on usability, and they do not consider web accessibility in their projects. Our findings also show that UXPs have a top-down approach to web accessibility and they think that it is the responsibility of project managers to make web applications accessible. In brief, the study showed that UXPs in Turkey need to be better educated and trained on web accessibility, and organizations need to realize that both top-down and bottom-up approaches are required to ensure accessibility of the web for all.