An evaluation of the web accessibility of China’s national-level museums

ABSTRACT

The universality of heritage carries the important connotation that it belongs to everyone. This universal value assigned to cultural heritage necessitates that it is international in nature, and that citizens of every country regardless of their background are given access and can learn from it. In this research, we investigate the web accessibility of the national-level museums of China that are ranked top three. We formulated a set of research questions and hypotheses that test assumptions, looking into the accessibility awareness in practice across 145 museums. We crawled a total of 113 web specific variables such as the number of objects in the collections, graded precious artefacts, and annual visitors. Other independent variables include summary accessibility errors such as contrast errors, alert errors, feature errors, structure, Accessible Rich Internet Applications, and social media accounts. Details of the errors in each of these categories would form the majority of the remaining data points. The findings were surprisingly, not according to our original assumptions. Museums would stand to benefit from this study, which will in turn improve accessibility and inclusivity, and thus provide the international community with access to the rich collections of over 10 million cultural heritage objects scattered across the country.

KEYWORDS:

• Web accessibility
• universal access
• international access
• disability
• China museums

Acknowledgments

The research is conducted between the NVIDIA Joint-Lab on Mixed Reality at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, and the Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Information Processing of Fujian Higher Education at Quanzhou. We wish to thank our interns Jinrong Huang and Zhiying Dai from the School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Quanzhou Normal University under our summer internship programme for developing the web crawler and scraper scripts for obtaining the data from published, publicly accessible repositories.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eugene Ch’ng

Eugene Ch’ng is professor of cultural computing at the University of Nottingham’s China campus and founding director of the NVIDIA Joint-Lab on Mixed Reality. He graduated with a best PhD award from the Electronics, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Birmingham in 2007. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles that investigate the use and adoption of cultural technologies. He is PI and Co-I on numerous grants that develop digital technologies for art, culture, cultural heritage and the creative cultural industry supported by UK, European and Chinese grants.

Yiping Wu

Yiping Wu is a lecturer at Quanzhou Normal University. Her research focuses on Human-Computer Interaction, especially in the development and use of Virtual reality, Augmented Reality and visualisation technologies for the cultural heritage domain.