Assessing the Usability and Accessibility of Malaysia E-Government Website

Mohd Isa Mohd Isa

doi:10.3844/ajebasp.2011.40.46

Abstract

Problem statement: With the proliferation number existence of Malaysia e-government websites, the usability and accessibility feature may has been overlooked by website developers. Approach: The main objective of this study is to investigate the usability and accessibility of Malaysia e-government websites. The usability measures are being measured by using Nielson usability guideline for the uploading speed and page size of the main page and number of broken links. The accessibility is measured by using Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG). Samples of 155 Malaysia e-government websites were selected from federal government websites and state government websites available at http://www.malaysia.gov.my. The usability and accessibility of the websites was analyzed by using several automatic evaluation tools such as Websiteoptimization, Axandra and EvalAccess 2.0 tools. Results: The evaluation process revealed several issues on usability and accessibility of Malaysia e-government website. There is high number of usability (speed and number of broken links) and accessibility problems for state website upon comparing to federal website. Conclusion/Recommendation: This study provides few recommendations for further improvement of the usability and accessibility features of e-government website based on the highlighted issues and key findings reported in this study.

Highlights

With the expansion of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) globally, many peoples opt to conduct official communications with the government by using the web technology
125 of the Malaysia e-government websites have main page size, uploaded in more than 34 KB. These results prove that usability traits are less than being considerate in Malaysia e-government web design by website developer
Accessibility analysis on e-government website: Overall usability results: The usability testing Table 6 and 7 revealed the accessibility analysis and includes speed, page size and broken links traits which summary description of the violated accessibility are based on Nielson (2000) related guideline to web checkpoints based on the sampling of 155 websites

Summary

Introduction

With the expansion of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) globally, many peoples opt to conduct official communications with the government by using the web technology. The web technology provides various benefits of changing the way people study and becomes a tool for government sectors to provide information and services to citizens. There is growing research on accessibility as such for older people (Nasir et al, 2008) and visually impaired person (Nordin et al, 2009). These web technologies are not perfect in terms of usability and accessibility. The main objective of this study is to investigate the usability and accessibility of Malaysia egovernment websites with reference to the WCAG 1.0 and Nielson usability guideline by using quantitative measures and automatic evaluation tools

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion