CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A new study finds state COVID-19 websites, including the one in North Carolina, failed to meet accessibility standards.
Researchers from North Carolina State University said the accessibility issues would affect people with low vision, visual impairment or those not familiar with computers.
N.C. State University Assistant Professor of Psychology Yingchen He and Graduate Research Assistant Dylan Hewitt analyzed websites of states and territories in the U.S. in 2021 and 2023.
One of them was the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services site.
“I thought it was important to focus on this because everyone deserves to equally access health care information, especially time sensitive information,” Hewitt said.
As part of the research, they ran accessibility checkers for the home page, along with pages with vaccine information and COVID-19 testing of the NCDHHS website.
They say while the website did some things right, it fell short in some areas. For example, links are not obvious because they don’t have differentiation from the rest of the text, such as a box or an underline. Hewitt said this could make its navigation challenging for someone with low vision or not familiar with computers.
In addition, Hewitt said the colors used on the vaccine page could make it hard for someone with low vision to see.
“[The accessibility checker is] showing contrast errors. Basically, when the button is unselected, the white on that gray is not a high contrast for somebody with low vision to see,” Hewitt said.
Furthermore, Hewitt said an embedded video didn’t have a title, which would prevent someone who is blind using a screen reader from knowing the topic of the video.
Metrolina Association for the Blind Orientation and Mobility Specialist Bradley Blair, who was born blind, uses and teaches people how to use screen readers. When Spectrum News 1 spoke with him, he went to the NCDHHS website to check for accessibility.
Before navigating the site, he mentioned many sites make it challenging for people like him to use.
“You have to be prepared if there are things on the website that are not accessible,” Blair said.
When he checked on the video title issue Hewitt described, Blair didn’t have any problems.
“The title appears to be ‘How do I know if I have long COVID?'” Blair said.
He did, however, find an issue with a banner alert when he visited the testing and treatment page.
“I click on this if you feel sick, and it’s flashing this alert. That’s a little bit difficult,” Blair said.
Overall, Blair said the state site was easy to navigate.
“So far, I would give it a high accessibility rate,” Blair said.
The researchers didn’t reach out to governments with their findings, but they wanted to raise awareness with their study.
“We hope that by identifying these issues and publishing these issues, we can make more people aware of these accessibility needs and eventually inspire them to create more websites that are easier for everyone to use,” Yingchen He said.
According to NCDHHS, it has not reviewed the study, but in the past three years, the agency has put equity and accessibility first for their public health response.
"The COVID site, like any website, is a work in progress, and we’re always open to feedback on ways we can continue to improve, especially when it comes to being inclusive and accessible for our fellow North Carolinians,” NCDHHS said in a statement.
Hewitt said the automated test of HTML code of the website they conducted is the first step in accessibility testing. The next step would be manual testing, preferably by people who would be potentially affected by accessibility issues.