Accessibility of eGovernment Services in Latin America

The Web has become a primary source for communicating information and providing services worldwide. Governments are not unaware of this trend; thus, in some countries their government institutions have taken the initiative of offering web-based electronic services (eGovernment). These services are available to its citizens, regardless of their location and physical, cognitive or technological capabilities. Unfortunately, some web designers and developers of eGovernment websites do not follow the web accessibility criteria, creating a gap in the accessibility of eGovernment services. This lack of web accessibility causes exclusion of some people and infringement of the human rights. This gap must be eliminated for the purpose of enabling elderly or disabled people to benefit from the use of eGovernment services offered by governments through their websites. This paper presents a study on the accessibility of eGovernment interactive services offered by two official entities of the Latin America countries. The evaluation was carried out based on the criterion of the experts on web accessibility and the use of a web accessibility evaluation tool. In both cases, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) were considered. These guidelines aim to achieve accessible web content for people with disabilities. The results of this research show that none of the evaluated websites which offer eGovernment services meet an acceptable level of accessibility. Additionally, several recommendations are presented to correct all accessibility errors detected in the analyzed web page. These recommendations can be applied to websites worldwide with the aim of achieving universal access to eGovernment websites.