Cabinet Office
eAccessibility is a critical requirement for any public service that is available online because it ensures that the benefits of service delivery are translated into reality for those groups of people who may face difficulty using, or even be excluded from, government information and services. This study breaks new ground in aiming to test how well the 25 Member States of the European Union (EU) and the European Commission meet this requirement in 2005, using the most appropriate combination of manual and automatic testing techniques.
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 improvement of public services across the developed world is greatly facilitated by the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), and in particular the use of the internet. The web is unique in its facility for opening up government to a wide range of people who have some form of disability in using the standard PC and keyboard. If websites can be designed to be accessible to these disadvantaged groups, then public services become available to large groups of citizens who have previously been excluded or at least seriously hampered, and those services become more useable for everyone.
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. This has exposed services to the problems of the digital divide, with technology invariably being viewed as part of the problem, and not the solution. So the focus has, in recent years, shifted to integrating the online service offering into the right mix of channels best suited to the target user audience, with a priority given to designing inclusive services from the outset. However, this approach has not diminished the importance of the online channel. In a multi-channel environment, it has the clear potential to increase accessibility and inclusiveness of a service to those excluded from traditional forms of interaction with public authorities – and to deliver real benefits to those who use public services the most
Chart 1 Accessibility by channel for different types of impairment
This chart illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of various channels of communication for citizens with a range of disabilities. The face to face channel can be effective for service delivery, but is the least efficient of the channels. Furthermore, travelling to, and using a face to face channel is often problematical for those with motor, visual or hearing impairment. Telephone is inaccessible to the hearing-impaired and difficult to operate for those with certain physical disabilities. Digital TV has limited accessibility to the visually impaired and can present difficulties for the deaf and hard of hearing if suitable captioning or signing avatars are not available. Again, this can be costly.
Web-based services have the potential to be accessible to a wider range of citizens if used correctly. Widespread adoption of web-based services designed for use on the PC has led to efficiency advantages in delivering services via fewer channels. If the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Guidelines from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are followed, websites can be made accessible to a very wide variety of people with disabilities and the delivery of inclusive government services in a multi-channel context becomes a more achievable objective through an accessible internet channel.
Consideration of eAccessibility is, therefore, a key component of designing and developing inclusive services, and is an essential policy issue to address for administrations seeking to transform public services for their user base. Furthermore, there is evidence that eAccessibility improves the usability of online service for all users, not just a niche audience, and as such engagement in this agenda has the potential to contribute to an increase in the take-up of services in general.
The latest estimates of internet usage in the European Union (EU) show that nearly 48.1% (nearly 222m of the 460m population) have access to the internet, varying from 73.6% in Sweden to 20.3% in Lithuania. (Source: www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm) [External Website].
“It is difficult to estimate how many people are affected by web accessibility, because countries use different methods and categories to determine the number of people with disabilities. Additionally, not all disabilities affect access to the web (for example, difficulty walking does not affect access to the web, though difficulty moving one's hands does). Also, common conditions (such as colour blindness) may not be considered disabilities in many countries, but do affect access to the web.”
Source: www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/soc [External Website].
Information is much less reliable about the proportion of those who have some disability preventing them from using the internet. In the UK, for example, it is estimated that some 8.6m people (15% of the population) have some form of vision impairment, and this excludes other groups such as those with dyslexia, usually estimated around 19% of the population. The same source (CSR Europe) estimates that 39m of the EU population are disabled. However, statistics on disability are difficult to compare internationally
In many countries, being prevented access to online services through poor design is illegal, and in others it would be considered discriminatory, if this were to occur. The moral case for eAccessibility is also supported by the business case. Many disadvantaged people depend on public services for support (e.g. for various state benefits), but until now have often found it difficult to gain access physically to sources of help and advice. The web opens up new possibilities that not only benefit individuals greatly but can also make it more efficient for the state to do business with them.
Seen in a wider perspective, accessibility and usability of internet-based services and products play a key role in allowing every citizen to achieve their full potential and to participate fully in society. This is not just beneficial for the individual, but equally so for society at large: it enhances an individual’ opportunities in education and employment as well as health and social life, therefore having a significant potential economic impact.
This report tests how well public services across Europe have been designed to meet this important objective.
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. This policy survey invited policy advisers in each Member State to answer questions about national strategy; legal frameworks; monitoring arrangements; awareness, training and tools and other issues such as certification systems. Section 2 of this report covers the results of the policy survey.
The second part of the study relates to work carried out in June and July 2005 comprising a detailed assessment of a wide selection of government service websites across Europe using a combination of automated and manual evaluation techniques. Section 3 describes in detail the results of the website evaluation.
This study breaks new ground in a number of ways. It is the first time that large numbers of public sector websites across the EU have been evaluated in this way; there have been surprisingly few previous surveys, given the importance of the topic, and most of these have been country-specific. It is the first time that policies on eAccessibility have been compared across a large number of countries and then related to results of website evaluation opening up new types of analysis, e.g. correlation of eAccessibility with sophistication of online services. Uniquely, the methodology used in this study is based on an appropriate blend of automated and manual techniques; previously, there has been a tendency to be over-reliant on automated testing which has its limitations – typically only 30% of checks against the guidelines can be tested automatically.
The criteria used for automatic and manual testing of websites are defined in internationally recognised guidelines. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) produced in May 1999 as part of its Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Version 1 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0). This was followed by:
Together, these form the WAI guidelines that have been officially adopted by individual governments, e.g. by the Australian Government in March 2000 and the UK Government in February 2001. The EU recommended in March 2002 that the guidelines should be adopted by the public sector in Member States.
The evaluation of services in this study has determined conformance of sites with Level A and Level Double-A of the WCAG1.0 guidelines which are summarised in Appendix 1 and the detailed methodology used for this assessment is shown in Appendix 2.
The eAccessibility of public services is not a new topic for research. There have been six studies in the past five years from a range of countries (including France, Ireland, UK and the USA.). References to each of these studies are given in Appendix 4.
The key message from the results of this past research is that that the level of eAccessibility is disappointingly low. The conclusion from these studies is that a high proportion of websites failed to meet the minimum standards of Level A accessibility resulting in large numbers of disabled users being excluded or significantly disadvantaged in their access to government information and services.
The most useful study is the one carried out by the Disability Rights Commission in the UK in 2003-04 entitled Web Access and Inclusion for Disabled People. This went beyond the assessment against the checkpoints for Level A conformance and explored the links between accessibility as defined by the W3C WAI Guidelines and the broader topic of usability. It found evidence of a good correlation between accessibility and usability. This is a particularly important finding as it demonstrates that improving eAccessibility also increases general usability of online public services for people whether or not they are disadvantaged. Accessibility is, therefore, an important policy response to the mainstream issue of poor take-up of online government services.