Digital Accessibility in Art Museum Webpages and Virtual Tours

EasyChair Preprint 14736

Abstract

This article delves into the crucial issue of digital accessibility on the web-sites of some of the world's most visited and renowned art museums and their virtual tour counterparts. The central objective and our guiding question are to explore the impact of digital adaptation, facilitated by technological innovation, on the infoaccessibility of virtual visit web pages. We aim to de-termine whether these digital adaptations outperform the pages that inform and publicize the respective museums for those who plan to visit in person. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis of the digital accessibility of the museums under study was conducted to ascertain if the web content adheres to the accessibility requirements outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), as stipulated in Directive (EU) 2016/2102 of the European Parliament and in the European Standard EN 17161:2019. The final analysis revealed some shortcomings, as several pages do not fully comply with the principles of vir-tual accessibility. Notably, we found that virtual visit pages of museums gen-erally underperform compared to information pages for in-person visits, alt-hough there are exceptions to this trend.

Keyphrases: Art Museum websites, Technological Digital Accessibility, Virtual Tours, Web accessibility, cultural heritage, digital accessibility, quantifiable results of level, quantitative and qualitative analysis, virtual visit pages of museums, virtual visit web pages

@booklet{EasyChair:14736,
  author    = {Fátima Matos Silva and Emilia Simão},
  title     = {Digital Accessibility in Art Museum Webpages and Virtual Tours},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 14736},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}