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1. Introduction
Universal access in the information society means having an accessible webpage whose information is accessible to anyone ([20] Stephanidis and Savidis, 2001). In several developed countries, such as the USA, Canada, Australia and EU nations, efforts have been made since the late 1990s to resolve the information gap for the disabled and the elderly. For example, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards-setting body for the web, has developed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) providing specifications on how to develop an accessible webpage. Additionally, Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 sets standards requiring that all electronic and information technology developed or purchased by federal departments and agencies be accessible to people with disabilities.
Information on webpages may be accessed directly or with the use of various assistive technologies. A website that is sufficiently flexible to be used by all of these assistive technologies is called an accessible website ([18] Slatin and Rush, 2003). Assistive technologies are developed based on the assumption that web design complies with accessibility guidelines ([23] Walshe and McMullin, 2006). Indeed, the more the webpage complies with accessibility guidelines, the easier it is for assistive technologies to render the page according to users' needs.
In addition to web accessibility guidelines, automated software tools (e.g. A-Prompt, Bobby) are available to help finding accessibility flaws in websites before the sites are publicly posted. Such software tools crawl through the websites and identify various coding solecisms, such as malformed Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or the absence of tags essential to assistive technologies.
However, fully automated compliance monitoring, though useful, cannot indicate whether webpages comply with accessibility guidelines ([14] Paciello, 2004). It can identify problems only if violations of the guidelines are machine-detectable ([8] King et al. , 2005). Indeed, the majority of checkpoints in accessibility guidelines are qualitative, in the sense that they require the exercise of human judgment ([8] King et al. , 2005; [14] Paciello, 2004). Thus, to accurately measure full compliance of webpages, human review of web content is mandatory ([8] King et al. , 2005; [16] Shi, 2006a).
By applying both the automated software tool and the human review of web content, this study has three objectives. First, the study compares websites of...