2016 Volume 36 Issue 1 Pages 25-31
The world-wide-web (WWW) is an important information media for a visually impaired person in Japan. Although there is lot of variations of their settings to use WWW, most of them use a screen reader. However, most webpages of public institutions in Japan are not coded as taking into account of a screen reader user, and their web accessibilities are not enough to pass JIS X 8341-3. The authors reviewed the top-pages of 47 national university hospital websites from viewpoint of web accessibility, in January, 2015, and found that; 1) as same as other public institutions, many websites did not pass JIS X 8341-3, of which the result did not show remarkable improvement from the reviews in 2014; and that 2) although most of information items on their webpages which patients need to access medical services in general were found near to the top of webpage, there were so many variations of ways to show these items: Such a variation may prevent a visually impaired person’s access to the information due to difficulty of understanding the structure of the webpage. These problems shows the necessity of the standard specifications of hospital webpage for visually impaired persons.
