La accesibilidad de las páginas web de la banca española

Abstract

The present thesis is within the frame of the doctorate program named "Gestión y Economía de las Pymes IV". The thesis, which will lead to the completion of the studies of the third cycle, is a complex and laborious task to investigate the framework of information systems started. Thus the projected plan is the analysis of actual situations for electronic banking and web accessibility. This work presents a new line of investigation not only for its content, but also for the special field it frames, which is the financial sector. On the one hand, we have a contemporary theme, which is the use of internet, being the web our object of analysis. On the other hand, we will deal with the Spanish banks, which have suffered from important ups and downs in the last years. Following these two premises, our proposed objective is to know the levels of accessibility in the web for Spanish bank organizations that operate in this country. Among all the financial entities which operate in our country, we focus in the Banks, the Credit Saving Banks and the Cooperatives of Credit, three of the most popular and daily used financial organizations. With respect to the labor of investigation and the accumulation of biographies, we are capable to comment that in the first moment, the investigator has presented a wide list of studies related to bank branches web accessibility, both at national level as well as the international one, and as regards the university environment as well as the private sector. Also, there are numerous studies commenting on the quantitative indices of web accessibility. Lastly, we have cited studies that have been presented by the Banks, many in Spain as well as abroad. On the other side, we have spoken of web accessibility, its concepts, definitions, and normative changes. By means of tables and graphs, the doctorate candidate has demonstrated the variations that have been produced with respect to the former directives. By means of an original way, a list of all the countries that have their own legislation over web accessibility is presented in this work. We have also exhibited in this document the valid norms and characteristics that each one of these have presented, as well as the effective date, the field of application, and the types and amounts of sanctions. One of our contributions for bank branch offices has been the creation of a survey over web accessibility with the help of experts. Once the consensus about the questionnaire, after various rounds of meetings, was achieved, this was posted on the internet, and it was given publicity for its fulfillment by means of social networks. In a second phase, answers were obtained by presenting the questionnaire directly to the participants. This way we have obtained abundant basic information in order to answer the proposed hypothesis. On the other side, we have analyzed more than 7,000 web pages with a wide range of available and free-accessed tools across the internet in order to evaluate the accessible levels on the web. Also, we have examined the style of sheets and the HTML code of the home page for corporations and their structures. Some of the instruments we have worked with have helped to inform us about the number of mistakes or errors on the home page and at the first level that each one of the analyzed institutions presents. Other instruments of observation have served to clarify the data, such as the date of creation of the page, the number of modifications, the popularity, the positional motors of search, the visibility, the authoritative control, the number of links, and the code words for Spanish electronic banking. Also we have included a quantitative analysis of the pages by means of the Failure and Wab indices. In this last case we have proposed an improvement in their calculations. In order to obtain the results, to make the presentation and to contrast them with the hypothesis of the study, we have used side sheets of Excel calculations for those cases where the evaluation has been easily obtained. For the best calculated analysis we have used the program SPSS in the version 22, in order to investigate causes that are not easily seen within the observed data. Among the mainl results that we are able to quote with our thesis, we are able to assert that no financial entities obtained a double level conformity A (AA) according to the guidelines of accessibility contained in the WCAG 2.0.