Homepage not enough when evaluating web site accessibility

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine if the homepage of a web site is representative of the whole site with respect to accessibility. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents an intraclass correlation (ICC) between homepage web accessibility barrier (WAB) scores and the WAB scores of web site levels 1 through 3 for 33 popular web sites. Findings – The paper finds that the homepage is not sufficient to detect the accessibility of the web site. ICC of the homepage and average of levels 1-3 is 0.250 (p 1⁄4 0:062) and ICC of levels 1, 2, and 3 is 0.784 (p , 0:0001). Evaluating the homepage and first-level pages gives more accurate results of entire site accessibility. Originality/value – This is first study correlating homepage accessibility with web site accessibility.