How governmental website accessibility affects all users : Adapting Swedish governmental websites’ visual accessibility and how it affects the access to information and services as well as general user experience

Sammanfattning

Many governmental websites all over the world lack proper accessibility incorporation, despite guidelines being offered by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Accessibility is often believed to only improve disabled users' experiences or to disrupt regular users' experiences and is therefore often dismissed in web design. For the purpose of discovering how non-disabled users' subjective experiences and thoughts are affected by visual accessibility changes, we conducted a study where ten participants were shown two versions of five different Swedish governmental websites. They were asked to first rate their experience based on seven questions on a Likert scale. We then conducted a semi-structured interview to gather information about their individual experiences, which served as the foundation for the conclusion in this thesis. The results suggest all users benefit from or are unaffected by accessible features being included. Aspects like text size, contrast, and proficient readability were most commonly mentioned as visual aspects that impacted the non-disabled users' experiences, while letter spacing was less impactful.