Revisiting Alabama state website accessibility

Potter's (2002) accessibility review of over 60 Alabama state-level websites was designed to establish a baseline for monitoring the state government's progress on online accessibility. The study found significant room for improvement. Only 20% of the reviewed sites met Section 508 requirements, and only 19% of the sites met WAI Priority 1 accessibility standards, based on a combination of automated evaluation and manual inspection of the code. In 2006, Alabama adopted ITS 1210 similar to 00S2: Universal Accessibility, which offered basic guidelines to assist developers in complying with Section 508 requirements. The current study revisits the state home pages that Potter evaluated to see how accessibility levels have changed over the years, particularly with the state's adoption of ITS-530S2. Like Potter, the current analysis is based on a combination of automated testing and a manual review of each page's HTML The study found that compliance has not improved substantially since Potter's analysis and reinforces the idea that the presence of a standard does not correlate with compliance. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.