Usability of e-government Web-sites for people with disabilities

While the proportion of people with disabilities 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. If this ignorance continues, people with disabilities will be even more disadvantaged since acquiring knowledge is now much easier for those without disabilities. This study is intended to provide an in-depth evaluation of the Web sites of Taiwan's central government based on the Web Content Accessibility (WCA) Guidelines provided by W3C. Based on the WCA Guidelines, the authors carefully studied and coded each individual Web site of the central governmental agencies. The coding results indicate that the governmental Web sites in general have made many of the mistakes warned against. In light of these research findings, this paper offers a number of strategies to improve the Web design practices in Taiwan that may also apply to public organizations in general.