Evaluating the accessibility of Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) websites in Malaysia

The involvement of companies in Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) industry in Malaysia is encouraging. In addition, there are growing interest to evaluate accessibility level of different genre of websites. However, the accessibility level of SMEs website in Malaysia has not yet being evaluated. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the accessibility level of SME website in Malaysia. Twenty two categories of SMEs, which contains two hundred and twenty websites, were selected from the web portal at www.shoppy.com.my. The accessibility evaluation was done by using EvalAccess 2.0 to evaluate the accessibility level according to the WCAG 1.0 guideline published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The study revealed several accessibility issues for the selected sample of SME websites in Malaysia and ends with few recommendations for further improvement of the website accessibility towards better improved online services and information for normal and disabled user.