Web Accessibility in Romania: The Conformance of Municipal Web Sites to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Abstract

The accessibility of public administration web sites is a key quality attribute for the successful implementation of the Information Society. The purpose of this paper is to present a second review of municipal web sites in Romania that is based on automated accessibility checking. A number of 60 web sites were evaluated against WCAG 2.0 recommendations. The analysis of results reveals a relatively low web accessibility of municipal web sites and highlights several aspects. Firstly, a slight progress in web accessibility was noticed as regarded the sample evaluated in 2010. Secondly, the number of specific accessibility errors is varying across the web sites and the accessibility is not preserved in time. Thirdly, these variations suggest that an accessibility check before launching a new release for a web page is not a common practice.

Keywords

• Accessibility
• Computer-Aided Evaluation
• Municipal Web Sites