Influence of WCAG rules on academic websites rankings: A correlation study between accessibility and quantitative webometrics

摘要

This paper focuses on finding out if the strict use of WCAG rules helps universities to improve positions in the Ranking Web of World Universities. For this purpose, top 25 European universities are selected and analyzed. On one hand, an accessibility analysis is performed through TAW test, retrieving automatic errors and warnings for the URL of each homepage‘s university. On the other hand, a cybermetric analysis is carried out, obtaining size, external inlinks, domain authority, and domain MozRank values. Results confirm the lack of correlation among accessibility and cybermetric figures, at least in the population under study.