Investigating the accessibility of banking websites in Saudi Arabia

The purpose of the current study is threefold. First, it evaluates the accessibility of banking websites in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Second, it examines the effect of bank size and prior performance on the implementation of web accessibility. Third, it explores the associations between the outputs of the different evaluation tools used. The study employed a combination of automated evaluation and a manual expert validation to assess 32 Saudi and foreign bank websites. The results show that none of the evaluated websites conformed fully to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, thus depriving many of their web customers the ability to make full use of the sites. No significant difference was found between the websites of the local and foreign banks in terms of accessibility compliance. The results also show no association between the size and profitability of banks and the number of accessibility issues detected. A positive relationship was found between the number of accessibility problems identified by TAW and total validator, and between total validator and MAUVE. This paper offers a number of recommendations to enhance the accessibility of banking websites in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.