Digital accessibility in Art Museum Webpages and Virtual Tours

Abstract

This article delves into the crucial and significant issue of digital accessibility on the websites 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 determine 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 virtual accessibility. Notably, we found that virtual visit pages of museums generally underperform compared to information pages for in-person visits, although there are exceptions to this trend. These findings have the potential to significantly impact the digital accessibility of art museum websites and virtual tours.