Procedures for achieving universally designed website for the Norwegian Broadcasting Cooperation [NRK]

Abstract

In the one hand, the trend of online digital media is booming leaving behind the traditional media due to its various advantages over traditional. On the other hand, the number of disability and old users are increasing and they represent large numbers in the society. To ensure that everybody has access to the digital contents in the media and to ensure the human rights of everyone, the accessibility of the online digital media has become essential to achieve. The accessibility of the web is the ability of the website to be accessed, interact, and perceive the contents by the disabled or old users with or without mainstream technologies in certain context of use. This research is follow-up research conducted by a group of researchers who found that the NRK’s website hadn’t fulfilled majority of the WCAG 2.0 criteria. NRK is a state owned Norwegian Broadcasting company that delivers media through various platforms. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the front-end development process of nrk.no/nyheter and to suggest what they should improve in their process to achieve web accessibility. In the evaluation process, the study of several factors like the process involved in the development, people involved in the process, and the strategy adopted by NRK to achieve accessibility was done. For the evaluation process, two qualitative research method i.e. interview and survey was conducted with participants from the team of front-end development in NRK. The data from these research methods was collected and analyzed through thematic analysis under content analysis. Through the data analysis, it was found out that there lie several barriers within process, people involved, and their strategy for the development of an accessible website.