An approach based on metrics for monitoring web accessibility in Brazilian municipalities web sites

ABSTRACT

Monitoring and measuring the accessibility of government Web sites is an important challenge for regulators and policy makers. Moreover, over the next few years, e-government (e-gov) services are expected to expand and it is necessary to ensure access for everyone. In this paper, we present a metric based approach for evaluating municipalities Web pages using automatic accessibility evaluation tools. The sampling of the pages was done by the tool E-GOVMeter, and the accessibility evaluation and generation of the metrics was done by means of an adaptation of the tool Hera. The results show that much work should be done to improve the accessibility of Brazilian municipalities Web sites. Although it has limitations, the use of automatically generated accessibility metrics is a powerful tool for helping measuring and monitoring the accessibility of e-gov Web sites.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
e-government, web accessibility, web accessibility evaluation, web metrics