Development of a Framework for Improving the Usability and Accessibility of Universities’ Postgraduate Websites

The usability and accessibility of Universities websites is paramount to the user hence it is expected to be friendly. This study focuses on development of a framework for improving some Nigerian University postgraduate websites. The methodology implemented involves the use of questionnaire for data gathering and automated tools for evaluating the internal attributes of the websites. The improved interfaces were developed following the Web Content Accessibility Guide (WACG) developed by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), using html as the front end and MYSQL as the backend. C – Sharp(C#) was used as the programming language and Microsoft Visual studio was used as the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). A comparative study was carried out on the selected Universities and was found out that some of the universities have large image size while some have large html size. This resulted into delay in response time which increases the download time of the websites. The results of the questionnaire showed that the user interface of the websites should be improved on the course registration, fee payment and helpdesk interfaces. Usability metric results showed that the users of University of Ibadan and BOWEN University postgraduate websites did not derive the desired satisfaction using the websites, hence a web portal optimization tool was developed to solve the problem of large images and html files.