THE ACCESSIBILITY OF DISABILITY SUPPORT OFFICES WEB PAGES AT UNIVERSITIES

Dr. Bulent Gursel Emiroglu

Kırıkkale University

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyse the accessibility of websites of the Disability Support Offices at the Universities in Turkey. Disability Support Offices, which are giving services under the Rectorate of the universities, aims to remove or at least minimize the barriers disabled students face during their education and social life in the campus and coordinate their cooperation with the related authorities. The design pattern of the research is structured according to survey model containing 53 universities in Turkey. At the result of the research, it is determined that communication details (telephone numbers, e-mail address, address) and the information about unit directors, commission members, aims of establishment, duties and activities exist at most of the web sites of the Disability Support Offices of the universities enrolled in the study. But at almost all of the universities' web sites, sign language translators, text-to-speech plug-ins and character enlarging facilities do not exist. At almost half of the universities enrolled in the study, the link of the Disability Support Office is visible at the main web page of the university. Another result gained from the study is that most of the universities do not use and exist in social media. According to the results gained from the study, web pages of the Disability Support Offices can be designed according to the accessibility items listed within the scope of the study or existing web sites can be edited and organized according to those items. Additionnaly, for further studies, it is proposed that analyzing the Disability Support Offices' web pages of state and foundation universities in Turkey by means of accessibility.

Keywords

Disability support offices, Web pages for disabled students, Accessibility.

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