Evaluation of web accessibility of consumer health information websites.

The objectives of the study are to construct a comprehensive framework for web accessibility evaluation, to evaluate the current status of web accessibility of consumer health information websites and to investigate the relationship between web accessibility and property of the websites. We selected 108 consumer health information websites from the directory service of a Web search engine. We used Web accessibility specifications to construct a framework for the measurement of Web Accessibility Barriers (WAB) of website. We found that none of the websites is completely accessible to people with disabilities, but governmental and educational health information websites exhibit better performance on web accessibility than other categories of websites. We also found that the correlation between the WAB score and the popularity of a website is statistically significant.