Evaluating accessibility conformance of state public health agencies' websites during the COVID-19 pandemic

The goal of our study was to evaluate conformance with accessibility guidelines of homepages and vaccine information pages on public health websites dedicated to COVID-19 information in the US. We used the Web Access Checker tool AChecker to assess the accessibility of 51 public health agency websites in 50 states and Washington, DC. We computed aggregated conformance counts at the guideline level. We evaluated violations of the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines and collated all known WCAG 2.0 problems for each criterion at the A, AA, and AAA levels for each state, for the homepages and vaccine pages separately. The largest number of known violations occurred in meeting the perceivability and operability principles. In particular, problems in providing non-text content, contrast, and text resizing were prevalent. Our evaluation indicates that state public health websites can improve support for non-text content, the use of assistive technologies, contrast, and text resizing.