WEB CONTENT ACCESSIBILITY GUIDELINES 2.1 COMPLIANCE BY INDIAN OERS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF SWAYAM AND E-PG PATHSHALA

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OERs) improves the quality of teaching and learning with the increased availability of quality, relevant, less costly learning materials (access). This paper describes the accessibility results of two Indian OER initiatives: e-PG Pathshala (ePGP) (OCW) and SWAYAM (SwM) (MOOC) by using TAW accessibility checker. A targeted web-page of the websites is validated for errors, warnings and not reviewed under AAA conformance level of WCAG 2.1 guidelines. The outcomes are tabulated beginning with POUR (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable & Robust) principle following their guidelines where the accessibility of ePGP and SwM was compared. The statistical result shows that the overall number of problems appeared in the case of SwM is higher (i.e. 110) than ePGP (i.e. 101). Again, the results of the descriptive statistics revealed Mean =2.806 (ePGP) & 3.056 (SwM). The SD obtained were 3.241 (ePGP) & 4.472 (SwM). The Shapiro-Wilk Test for normality of data revealed non-normal data while the WCAG 2.1 POUR parameters were found to be positively correlated for ePGP and SwM (rs = 0.67, p <0.001).

Keywords: Web accessibility; Open Educational Resources; MOOCs; POUR; WCAG 2.1; ePGPathshala; SWAYAM; INFLIBNET