Details
- Publication date
- 14 July 2020
- Authors
- Katja Kous (University of Maribor, Slovenia) | Saša Kuhar (University of Maribor, Slovenia) | Miha Pavlinek (mWS myWorld Solutions AG, Graz, Austria) | Marjan Heričko (University of Maribor, Slovenia) | Maja Pušnik (University of Maribor, Slovenia)
- Country
- Slovenia
- Language
- English
- Year
- 2020
Description
Editorial information: Universal Access in the Information Society, ISSN Web edition: 1615-5297
Digitalization and technological innovations provide many benefits for citizens worldwide, increasing the quality of life in several ways, including by enhancing access to information. However, people with disabilities can face challenges when retrieving online information as they often use assistive technologies that might not be fully supported by web pages.
Municipalities’ websites are an important source of information for all citizens, regardless of their individual characteristics. To be able to support all citizens’ needs, several standards provide support for web developers. One of the standards is “Standard EN 301 549–Accessibility requirements suitable for public procurement of ICT products and services” in Europe.
This study addresses the accessibility of public government services, more specifically municipalities’ websites, where there are still accessibility challenges. With a systematic literature review, we found no studies that would analyse the government web pages’ compliance with Standard EN 301 549. Therefore, this research had two main research goals: (1) to verify whether the websites of Slovenian municipalities were compliant with the Standard EN 301 549 in the years 2017 and 2018, and (2) to compare the results before and after the adoption of Standard EN 301 549 in Slovenia.
The answers to the research questions were obtained with an accessibility evaluation of 189 Slovenian municipalities’ websites. The results, based on a descriptive analysis, indicate that, in 2017, none of the evaluated websites were fully compliant with the web content requirements of Standard EN 301 549, while at the end of 2018, 62 websites (33%) were fully compliant with the aforementioned standard. Furthermore, the results from an extended statistical analysis indicate improvement in websites standard compliance in 2018, even significant improvement for some web requirements after the adoption of the standard.