COVID-19 vaccine website accessibility dashboard.
Grace Jo, Daniel Habib, Varshini Varadaraj and 6 others
PMID 35534390WHAT IT FOUND
State COVID-19 vaccine websites contained accessibility errors that could block people with disabilities.
Insufficient text contrast was the most common issue. Registration portals often required visual CAPTCHAs without audio options, creating barriers for blind or visually impaired users.
Key findings
01Insufficient text contrast was the most common accessibility error, accounting for 78.2% of all detected issues on information web pages.
02Eight states used CAPTCHAs for vaccine registration, and only five of these provided an audio option, potentially blocking users with visual impairments.
03Accessibility rankings for information and registration pages within the same state were inconsistent, with a correlation of 0.304.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The study only analyzed the first page of registration portals, potentially missing errors on subsequent pages. WAVE primarily detects issues relevant to visual disabilities and may miss barriers for users with cognitive, hearing, or motor disabilities. States without a centralized registration portal were excluded from the registration analysis. The data represents a single week in spring 2021 and may not reflect current website accessibility.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The study was supported by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that a high ranking for a state's information page means its vaccine registration portal is accessible. The correlation between the two was low, meaning a state could have easy-to-read guidelines but a registration form that blocks users with visual impairments due to CAPTCHAs or poor contrast.