A Crowdsourcing Framework for Web Accessibility Remediation in Under-Resourced Civil Society Organizations

Accessibility legislation holds patient advocacy charities and national government agencies to identical WCAG 2.1 standards, yet the capacity to act on violations is distributed very unequally. This paper reports a two-phase study of Irish civil society websites. Phase 1 audited 1,813 publicly accessible homepages from a national membership directory, finding a mean accessibility score of 80.8 out of 100, a mean of 10.3 violations per site, and 16.2% of sites below 70%. Phase 2 responds with a crowdsourcing framework that decomposes WCAG violations into technical and non-technical task categories and routes them to volunteers from academic, research and professional networks. A pilot across 80 sites in eight organizational categories produced a mean improvement of 15.6 percentage points, and 187 tasks were completed by 23 volunteers with an 86.6% completion rate and 91.4% first-pass verification acceptance.