Website Accessibility in Top U.S. Schools of Social Work

Background:

Ensuring the accessibility of School of Social Work websites is crucial for promoting inclusivity and equal opportunities. This is particularly important considering that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in four people in the US report having a disability, underscoring the imperative for academic institutions to prioritize web accessibility for a diverse audience. Inaccessible websites can be difficult or even impossible to navigate for people using assistive technologies like screen readers, speech recognition software, and magnification.

This study audited the accessibility of the top 10 schools of social work websites, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report 2023. Utilizing Utah University's Web Accessibility In Mind (WebAIM) automated accessibility scans, we analyzed these schools' compliance with national and internationally recognized accessibility standards, Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 2.1 AA. Recently, WCAG has been incorporated into the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), highlighting its significance in ensuring digital accessibility.

Methods:

We examined the School of Social Work Masters in Social Work (MSW) web pages, employing the Web AIM WAVE automated testing tool to evaluate multiple pages of each school's website. Universities' sites were scored based on the number of detected errors, error density (calculated as the number of errors per web page element), and the presence of likely or potential accessibility issues, resulting in an automated accessibility score. The final scores (from 1 to 10) were determined based on alignment to the WebAIM Million benchmark, which evaluated one million homepages to gauge the general web accessibility landscape, allowing for a comparison of each tested university website to the general web. A high score indicated the least number of detectable accessibility errors.

Once the scores for each school of social work were obtained, a second analysis was conducted to compare the school of social work score against their broader University score utilizing scoring from WebAIM undertaken in 2022.

Results:

The automated WebAIM scores for each of the top 10 schools of social work were as follows: the University of Chicago scored 9.9, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work scored 9.8, Case Western Reserve University scored 9.8, the University of Washington scored 9.7, the University of Texas Austin scored 9.1, the University of California Berkeley scored 8.6, University of California Los Angeles scored 6.0, Washington University scored 6.2, the University of Michigan School of Social Work scored 5.9, the Columbia School of Social Work scored 5.3.

Conclusion and Implications:

The study highlights a pressing need for Schools of Social Work to improve website accessibility by adhering to the WCAG standards.

The variance in accessibility among top schools could impact the recruitment and enrollment of students with disabilities, affecting program diversity. As advocates for social justice, social work programs must lead by example in removing barriers to education.