Abstract—The Web is a progressively more important resource in many aspects of life: government, commerce and more. As governments to continue to provide businesses and citizens with new value-added e-services, citizens with disabilities are still being deprived from taking full advantage of these services. While the proportion of people with disabilities (visual impairment, hearing impairment, cognitive disability etc.) in society has been rapidly increasing due to the demographic trends long documented by many researchers, governmental leaders have paid little attention to their needs when planning and implementing Web projects. Therefore, it is essential that all citizens must have equal accessible opportunities to all e-government recourses. This research evaluates the accessibility of each of the 25 e-Government websites in Turkey by people disabilities based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 and 2.0 and using automated testing tools. The results of study indicate that the prevalent priority-1 accessibility barriers identified in this study were related to the absence of text equivalents for non-text elements, and the failure of the static equivalents for dynamic content to get updated when the dynamic content changes.

Index Terms—web accessibility, disability, e-government

Cite: Yakup AKGÜL and Kemal VATANSEVER, "Web Accessibility Evaluation of Government Websites for People with Disabilities in Turkey," Journal of Advanced Management Science, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 201-210, May 2016. doi: 10.12720/joams.4.3.201-210