eGovernment and Web Accessibility in South America

Abstract

The number of e-government websites has increased greatly in recent years. Many countries have laws to ensure that e-government sites satisfy web accessibility requirements. The objective of web accessibility is to ensure that people with disabilities can access websites just like everyone else. However, laws that enforce web accessibility do not automatically guarantee compliance: e-government websites are not always prepared to provide a correct service to persons with disabilities. This paper analyses the accessibility of a group of e-government websites of all South American countries and Spain. Three official websites from each country has been analysed: the government, the Parliament and the Senate websites. Different automatic evaluation tools have been used to perform the analysis. The preliminary results of our research show that the majority of e-government websites do not provide adequate levels of web accessibility.