Accessibility and Readability of Dementia-Related Information on Websites.

The study aimed to identify websites with dementia-related content and evaluate their readability and accessibility. A purposeful sample of 300 websites, which provided information on dementia, were identified from searches using the Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines. Two generic evaluation tools based on WCAG2.0 were used to assess the accessibility of information on dementia and two readability tests (Flesh-Kincaid Grade level and SMOG) were used to evaluate the websites. Only 94 websites have a HON certificate (31.3%), while 38 of the finally selected websites have an average of 56.89 and 32 problems in relation to the Axe and Achecker tools respectively. The most common problems (for images on 19 and 17 of the websites respectively) were related to text resize and the lack of text explanation, and an insufficient color contrast was found on 35 websites. The readability score was 8.2 (FKG) and 7.4 (SMOG) on average, which meant that the sites in question were not recommendable for the general population.