Evaluating and Creating high-quality, Accessible Online Content

After initially defining the “content gap” faced by millions of low-income and underserved Americans, like those with disabilities, limited-literacy or limited-English skills, The Children’s Partnership began promoting strategies to close that gap. TCP published The Search for High-Quality Online Content for Low-Income and Underserved Americans: Evaluating and Producing What's Needed, which includes original research and recommendations to encourage both the creation and evaluation of high-quality, accessible online content.

The report also includes a set of guidelines, a practical tool to assist people in learning how to identify and develop online content accessible to underserved individuals. Use our interactive evaluation tool to see how well a Web site meets underserved users' needs.

Additional content evaluation Resources

Below is a sampling of relevant Web resources:

• Consumer Reports WebWatch, division of the nonprofit Consumers Union, is dedicated to improving the credibility of Web content by providing research and advocating on behalf of consumers. They have developed guidelines for evaluating specific categories of online content, including health sites and search engines. Their various guidelines and other tools are available on their Web site.
  
  
• The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) leads the effort to provide guidelines and resources to make online content accessible to those with disabilities. The WAI provides procedures to how to evaluate a Web site’s accessibility during the development phase, as well as how to continually monitor sites for ongoing compliance with accessibility standards. More information about evaluating content for accessibility available on the WAI’s Web site.
  
  
• Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director of Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, publishes an annual analysis of state and federal e-government Web sites. The sites are evaluated on a wide range of criteria, including readability level, accessibility to those with disabilities, foreign language content or translation services, and level of privacy and security. His annual reports are available on his Web site.