Accessibility Design Issues beyond the Standards of Government e-Services for People with Low Vision

Abstract

Governments have been investing considerable resources into making their services to citizens available through the Internet. However, people face barriers when accessing these e-services. Barriers affect people with disabilities to a greater extent. Taking into account the accessibility-in-use in addition to the required standards while designing these services would mitigate some of these issues. In this work, five e-services from the Spanish government were selected from among the most used ones and tested with fifteen participants, of whom ten participants belong to the group of people with low vision. Different qualitative and quantitative measures were analyzed to determine whether participants with low vision had more difficulties performing the tasks and to identify the design issues required to achieve improvement. The results highlighted some issues to be incorporated into the complexity and cognitive accessibility evaluations of e-services to anticipate difficulties (e.g., error prompting/prevention mechanisms). In addition, contributions to existing accessibility standards are proposed to be considered in the design of the e-services.