Revisiting Alabama state website accessibility

• Follow up of Potter’s (2002) study of Alabama state-level website accessibility.
• Combined automated and manual HTML inspection.
• Alabama established state-level accessibility guidelines in 2006.
• Most sites failed to meet one or more state guideline.
• Minor improvement in the number of sites meeting federal and international standards.

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 1210-00S2: 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.