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Accessibility Evaluations of 100 Banking and Finance Websites
in the United States Erin Feaser, Allison Wilson, James Smith and Dylan Smith with Dr. Brian Wentz (Management Information Systems) And Dr. June Pham (Finance) __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract If a state did not have a financial institution on the above lists the largest bank in that state, based on assets, was added to the list; any duplicates were not include and the next largest bank from that state was selected so that each state was represented. A list with the top credit cards, electronic cash, and finance information websites in term of internet traffic was generated. The two lists were combined, and had a total of 100 different websites to access. Website Assessment Conclusions With the wide-spread use of and reliance on web-based banking and finance systems by many consumers today, it is important to ensure that banking and finance systems are fully accessible for individuals with disabilities. The purpose of this project was to expand upon work done over the past two years that began to explore and document the accessibility problems that exist with banking and finance systems. We strategically selected a sample of 100 banking and finance websites and conducted manual accessibility inspections on each home page, based on WCAG 2.0, to determine their accessibility and the potential significance to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The resulting analysis will provide the next level of empirical documentation of the current state of banking and finance accessibility in the U.S. Each member of the research team individually evaluated each selected website. Evaluation of websites included scanning the website’s code to find poor practices, checking color contractions of text, and using a screen reader. Accessibility issues are very common, even among the most popular websites. Some of the most common violated criteria found were Contrast (Minimum), Resize Text, Parsing , Bypass Blocks , and Non-text Content. Each site violated, on average, 5.97 criteria. 21 banks had 6 violations, 17 banks had 5 violations, 14 banks had 7 violations, and 12 banks had 8 violations. One of the criteria, Language of Page, requires every web page have a correct language declaration, (<html lang="en">, for example). This top site passes while the bottom site violates this criteria (missing the lang attribute). Evaluation Criteria Development A variety of web browsers were used to diminish errors created by the use of a specific browser. A checklist using the criteria from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. WCAG 2.0 is part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium, the main international standards organization for the Internet. This checklist evaluated only levels 1 and 2, per the US Section 508 Refresh equivalents. Financial Institution Selection Consensus Evaluation After the independent evaluation each member’s checklists were compared to determine which lines of the checklist were unanimously marked or not marked for each website. The checklists were then compared to see which lines were not unanimous. All lines that were not unanimous were reexamined by the team during a meeting. Each line was discussed until a consensus was reached. Lists of the financial institutions with the largest deposits, largest assets, and most branches were constructed. Financial institutions that appeared on each of the above lists were extracted; in addition, financial institutions that were in the top 30 slots of the deposits and branch lists and had total assets of at least $100 billion were also extracted.
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