Accessibility assessment and enhancement of e governance websites for disabled people in India

Abstract

E Governance is the application of information and communication technology for providing government services efficiently to their users in the form of a two way communication However the success and the failure of these E Governance websites are heavily dependent on some important aspects mainly website accessibility and usability newlineThe research in this thesis primarily focuses on the accessibility of E Governance websites in India Moreover the literature has been used to elucidate that there are limited studies conducted in the field of E Governance s website accessibility in India The existing studies showed that there is a need to improve the accessibility of Indian E Governance websites by way of clear framework or by roadmapping to develop accessible E Governance websites as well as an entirely novel metric method that can be used to assess the accessibility assistance of developed E Governance websites and also to rank them based on their accessibility assistance levels meant for the usage of disabled people Hence the primary goal of this research was to investigate the current level of accessibility of the Indian E Governance website identify the root cause of accessibility problems and also to provide specific requirements that satisfy the needs of the disabled people on E Governance websites with a view to improve and maintain a high level and consistent accessibility as well as to provide a roadmap for developing and enhancing the accessibility of E Governance websites A novel metric system was used to assess the assistance needed for disabled people and to access the websites thereby achieving great success within the E Governance website development in India This research work started with heuristic evaluation of Indian E Governance websites with a view of understanding the accessibility issues by automatic evaluation tool perspective This study involved sampling of 40 E Governance web sites from 4 different categories of websites and the study reveals that none of the tested E Governance websites met the requirement of disabled people access based on the WCAG guidelines Next to be investigated was the level of accessibility of the existing E Governance websites in India from the manager s and content developer s perspective The study for this stage involved a sample of 48 managers and content developers who are in charge of managing and maintaining E Governance websites in India This part of research revealed that the main problems undermining the Indian E Governance website accessibility was the lack of the general accessibility awareness the lack of clear accessibility standards and guidelines the lack of sufficient level of end user involvement in the process of design and maintenance of E Governance services limited budgets and the lack of expert website designers Additionally to build a clear overview about the level of E Governance website accessibility in India by investigating main aspects related to design from an end user s perspective The study for this stage involved 22 participants in testing nine Indian E Governance websites and 198 samples were collected This part of study revealed that the Indian E Governance websites generally do not have a high level of accessibility and that there is a lack of the needs and requirements of the end user the lack of testing and monitoring of the websites the lack of involvement of end users poor collaboration and coordination among government agencies poor standardization lack of trust and the lack of satisfaction Further the outcome of the early mentioned studies was used to establish the model to improve the accessibility of E Governance websites in India through a clear roadmap The model was validated by 128 participants which include E Governance website managers Experts in website designing research scholars and academic specialists and conducted ONE WAY ANOWA and POST HOC test The outcome reveals that the proposed model can be very beneficial for promoting E Governance website accessibility particularly in India and in other countries with similar backgrounds and situations newlineFinally this research work proposed a novel metric AAEM in order to measure the level of accessibility barriers required by disabled people to access the E Governance websites and rank them based on the barriers rate The measurement metrics reliability was measured by the Cronbach s Alpha test and validity was measured by using the existing accessibility metric WAB The proposed metric s assistance scores are compared with the WAB scores for the selected 45 E Governance websites The AAEM scores showed better results than WAB newline