From Legal Frameworks to Practice: Assessing Implementation of Web Accessibility Laws and Websites in Israel and New Zealand – Research Dataset

This repository supports the study From Legal Frameworks to Practice: Assessing Implementation of Web Accessibility Laws and Websites in Israel and New Zealand. The study adopts an integrated comparative mixed-methods design to examine web accessibility from both technical and institutional perspectives. It investigates how different national approaches to accessibility governance are reflected in website accessibility implementation. The research addresses two principal questions concerning (1) the technical characteristics of web accessibility implementation and (2) the institutional characteristics of national accessibility frameworks. Two hypotheses guided the study: first, that key technical accessibility dimensions reflect website accessibility implementation, and second, that stronger legal frameworks demonstrate stronger institutional characteristics for promoting digital accessibility. Website accessibility was evaluated using a combined methodology of automated testing and expert manual assessment based on WCAG 2.0 Level AA and the Accessibility Barrier Score (ABS) framework. The legal assessment was conducted independently by two reviewers using a structured evaluation framework covering predefined legislative dimensions. Standardized coding procedures, predefined evaluation criteria, and inter-rater reliability measures were applied to improve consistency and transparency throughout the evaluation process. The findings should be interpreted as comparative and explanatory rather than correlational or causal. The study does not test statistical relationships between legal frameworks and website accessibility outcomes. Instead, it provides an integrated comparative interpretation of how technical implementation and institutional governance coexist across different regulatory environments. The repository is intended to promote transparency, reproducibility, methodological reuse, and future comparative research in digital accessibility, accessibility governance, information systems, and public policy.