Web Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization: an investigation on the implementation and its effect within e-commerce websites in Sweden

Sammanfattning: With the digital world we live in today, inclusion on the web is crucial. Ensuring all who want to access the web can do so is a responsibility that can be vague. As prior research has shown that making a website accessible is a low prioritized matter because of time and money, but also lack of knowledge, the purpose with this thesis was to find out if factors used for search engine optimization could cater to web accessibility. There is a general understanding that there are overlapping factors between the two concepts. Since search engine optimization is a desired and successful part of providing a website with traffic, an overlap should improve accessibility. To understand in what way the search engine optimization factors could affect the accessibility of a webpage as a whole, with this thesis we go into the context of implementation by interviewing web professionals. As this thesis will show, there are multiple aspects needed to be taken into consideration when measuring to what extent the overlapping factors affect website performance in regards to accessibility. Factors like the clients, thoughts about responsibility, experience and even personal interest come into play. The method used was qualitative where we analysed the data with a thematic analysis and descriptive statistics. The data collection had three parts: a survey, an in-depth interview with a few of the participants from the survey, and finally a web performance test. The latter was performed by Siteimprove crawl, which administers one of the top accessibility ranking tools online. The general indication was that we cannot draw a conclusion to the benefit of it being enough to just implement the SEO factors that overlap. Although, this investigation provides an insight into to what extent web professionals are implementing the overlapping factors between search engine optimization and web accessibility, and what other aspects may influence web performance.