EVALUATING THE ACCESSIBILITY OF KUWAITI E-GOVERNMENT WEBSITES

Abstract

Nowadays, the Web is used as a medium for providing different kinds of services for people. The needs of people with disabilities have to be taken into consideration when developing E-government. The objective of this work is to evaluate the Web accessibility issues facing people with disabilities in Kuwait in an attempt to identify problems, enhance government awareness and promote inclusion. In order to evaluate the accessibility of E-government services in Kuwait, we apply automatic and expert evaluation on the top 17 E-government services used in 2018 in Kuwait. The obtained results show that 13 of the evaluated E-services are impossible to use and thus reveal a serious weakness in adhering to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level A for most of the evaluated websites. In addition, the study shows the importance of following the task-based approach when evaluating the accessibility of the websites, as navigation between different pages when completing each task can help in discovering other accessibility issues.

Keywords

• e-government services
• accessibility
• blind
• people with disabilities
• web accessibility evaluation