Abstract
This study aimed to evaluate the current state of accessibility, performance and engagement of higher education institution websites in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Using four tools, namely AChecker, WAVE, PageSpeed Insights and Similarweb, a total of 58 higher education homepages were evaluated from both the public and private sectors. The results show that only 8% of the evaluated websites conformed fully to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. Ninety-five percent of the websites had poor performance or needed further improvement, and interestingly, 60% had a good bounce rate. The results also show that users significantly spent more time and visited more pages on the websites of the public institutions compared to the private ones. These findings call for an urgent need to address web accessibility and performance violations in higher education institution websites in Saudi Arabia to make them more accessible for all their potential users. Recommendations are offered toward the end of the paper.