Cabinet Office
Over the past five years there has been a major drive to put government services online supported by significant investments by Member States and European institutions. In the emerging multi-channel environment, the online channel has the clear potential to increase accessibility of services to those excluded from traditional forms of interaction with public authorities. Achieving inclusion is an essential objective of e-government agendas across Europe, and eAccessibility of online services is a key enabler to achieving this objective
The latest estimates of internet usage in the European Union show that nearly 48.1% (222m of the 460m population) have access to the internet. It is also estimated that 39m of the EU population are disabled.
The purpose of this report is to present results from a comprehensive assessment of the eAccessibility of government online services across the European Union (EU). The study breaks new ground in aiming to test how well the 25 Member States of the EU and the European Commission meet this requirement in 2005.
The study comprises two parts. The first part relates to a survey carried out in May and June 2005 of policies towards accessibility of online public services in each of the 25 Member States of the EU and the European Commission.
The second part of the study relates to work carried out in June and July 2005 comprising a detailed assessment of 436 government service websites across Europe. The main objective was to report conformance of public sector websites with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s WCAG 1.0 at Levels A and Double-A.