Web Accessibility for Disabled: A Case Study of Government Websites in Pakistan

It is the era of information technology and governments around the world opting for electronic government and official websites are now under the use of a diverse population for the purpose of information retrieval. A number of disabled persons are becoming the part of this society but they are ignored when web projects are planned and developed. If this practice of software development is kept continuing then disabled persons would not take the advantage in the electronic government era. This study evaluates the websites of central government in Pakistan including all ministries and divisions using accessibility evaluation tools based on World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) web accessibility standards. Functional accessibility evaluator and total validator are the tools which are used for the evaluation process. The results shows that most of the web sites are not developed according to the accessibility standards for disabled persons. In the light of these results, recommendations are made to improve the accessibility of these websites for disable persons.