Evaluate Accessibility and Usability Issues of Particular China and Pakistan Government Websites

Abstract

Today the Web has become an essential part of people’s life. Everyone has the right to access websites, including seniors and disabled people. Government websites contain public information for the whole society, but affect mostly disabled people. In this paper, we have analyzed the accessibility and usability issues of selected top 60 government websites of Pakistan and China. We analyzed all websites’ loading time, page size, mobile friendliness, broken links, HTML5 and ARIA, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 (Level A, Level AA, Level AAA) conformance, and contrast errors through online accessible testing tools and human inspections. We designed an interactive evaluation framework for Web accessibility and usability, which is used to evaluate both countries’ government websites. According to the evaluation 22 out of 30 Chinese government websites have less than about 50% of the accessibility issues, while Pakistan in contrast only 12 out of 30 government websites have less than about 50% of accessibility issues. The Chinese government websites are much better than Pakistani government websites with respect to accessibility and usability features. The all-inclusive results indicate that Pakistan government websites have poor conformance levels to meet WCAG standards. We gave some valuable recommendations, which will be helpful for web designers, developers and also web users particularly disabled people performance in the newest Artificial Intelligence (AI) area in a decent way.