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Poor web accessibility has negative social and economic effects as regards the inclusion of citizen and customers in the provision of online services. In this respect, accessible university websites is a precondition to ensure fair access to education to all young people. In this work, the focus is on the web accessibility for people with visual impairment. The objective of the paper is to present the results of a study exploring the website accessibility of 18 top-ranked universities in Romania. Evaluation has been done against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2. 0 (WCAG2) in a tool-based approach The evaluation results show that overall, the web accessibility of university websites is low. None of the websites passed the first accessibility level. Most of the accessibility errors are related to the compliance with the first WCAG2 guideline: alternative text for non-text content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media technologies provide various forms of educational support. Online discussion groups have been created by educators to maintain a closer relationship with the students. Although the online discussion groups are widely used in universities, the research on this topic has been carried on mainly by qualitative studies. There are few approaches measuring the educational support provided by the online discussion groups. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the gender differences in the perception of the educational support provided by the online discussion groups. The educational support has been conceptualized as a global factor that manifests along three dimensions: support for teaching, support for personal development and support for professional formation. An invariance analysis has been carried on that showed a metric invariance of the model. The gender analysis results show that both female and male students consider that the discussion groups stimulate the collaborative learning, facilitates sending the projects to the teacher and stimulates the initiative in learning. Meantime, female students scored higher almost all items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing popularity of Facebook among university students stimulated the researchers to understand the reasons for joining and using the social networking websites. Several findings of the extant research suggest that the motives of using social networking websites are depending on the virtual community type and users' profile. The objective of this paper is to develop and empirically validate a multidimensional model of the reasons why Romanian university students are using Facebook. The motives of using Facebook have been conceptualized as a global factor with three dimensions: extending the social relations, information & collaboration, and maintaining the social relations. The model has been validated on two samples collected from two Romanian universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Romanian Journal of Human - Computer Interaction is the property of Matrix Rom and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Romanian Journal of Human - Computer Interaction is the property of Matrix Rom and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)