In 1999 the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium developed guidelines for barrier-free websites to make the Internet accessible for erveryone. Although providers of web-content could address a bigger target-group with a barrier-free website, the major part of commercial and public providers in Austria do not offer their information in the internet in such a way. Thus the aim of this thesis is to point out the state-of-the-art of standards for web accessibility and furthermore to present possible reasons, based on a case study on hospitals in Vienna, why a lot of websites are not accessible to everyone.In the first part of the thesis an extensive interdisciplinary study of the relevant literature is conducted in order to describe the standards for web accessibility, different barriers that could occur as well as advantages of accessible websites. In the second part questionnaires are sent out to all hospitals in Vienna. Furthermore, the access to their websites is evaluated on the basis of the guidelines from the Web Content Accessibility Initiative.Due to the results of the questionnaires and the evaluation of the websites the hypothesis that claims, that barriere-free websites in the hospital-sector are not very widespread, is comfirmed. In addition possible reasons for the low offer of barrier-free websites in this sector are figured out.
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