Evaluation of Official Governmental (e-Government) Websites for Accessibility in the Middle East

Abstract

World Wide Web (www), a digital platform providing access to information in an accessible and equitable manner offers immense opportunities to all categories of users. Its inclusivism enables people with physical challenges to access websites, identify, appreciate, navigate, utilize, interact and contribute to the web. This study evaluates the web accessibility features of 58 governmental websites of 17 countries in the Middle East by means of the manual and the automated testing methods with different benchmarks based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG) and Section 508 standards for the website accessibility, for each to achieve a more comprehensive and efficient result for better analysis. The results of the findings are contrasting; from the manual evaluation based on specific criteria, countries such as United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman scored high percentages in majority of the criteria but scored very low in the automated evaluation.