How Jordanian e-Government websites respond to the needs of people with disabilities

Abstract

Many Governments have realized the importance of information and communication technology (ICT) to improve the delivery of information and services to citizens and business. The fame of internet use, and the wide spread of mobile and portable means made the access to the governmental services easy and reachable at any time for a wide sector of citizens. People with disabilities have all the right to benefit from the e-services provided by the governmental websites equally with other citizens. To do so e-government websites must conform with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This paper was undertaken with three main purposes in mind, First: identifying the accessibility level of Jordanian e-Government websites in conformance with web content accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) at three level of priority, Second: assessing the efforts that have been devoted by the e-government websites to improve accessibility of Jordanian citizens with disability by comparing the recent results with our own study held in 2008. And finally, comparing Jordanian e-government accessibility results with another country (i.e. Dubai's e-government). The results indicate that the majority of Jordanian e-government websites fail to meet the minimum W3C accessibility conformance level. on the other hand many considerable improvements have taken place during the past 8 years. More than 65% of the errors had been eliminated. In comparison with Dubai's study, Jordanian e-Government websites score better in term of the average number of errors per page for priority1 and priority3 and approximate average number of errors per page for priority3.