Accessibility analysis using WCAG 2.1: evidence from Indian e-government websites

Abstract

E-government is a global phenomenon. Many governments throughout the world are using e-government websites to deliver government services to their stakeholders. Consequently, it is now quite crucial for the governments to make sure that e-government websites must be accessible to all stakeholders regardless of their visual, cognitive, and hearing ability. However, many prior studies have shown that most of the e-government websites in different countries do not meet the accessibility guidelines prescribed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In this article, we present the evaluation of the accessibility of Indian e-government websites using a sample of 65 websites of various ministries based on the WCAG 2.1 standard. We found that the majority of e-government websites do not meet Level A conformance with WCAG 2.1. Our findings suggest that designers and developers of e-government websites should pay due attention to the accessibility features during the design and development of these websites to achieve universal accessibility.