Local Government Websites Accessibility: Evaluation and Finding from Italy

Abstract

The Internet is dramatically changing the way that governments serve their citizens. Ensuring the municipal website is accessible to all citizens needs to be a top priority on the public digital marketing to-do list. Specifically, when we are in the presence of citizens who suffer from a specific impairment or technical hindrance, local governments have to provide them with equal access to their services. Starting from an analysis of the generic theoretical and legislative framework to which each municipality website must adhere, the paper investigates accessibility issues of local government websites taking into account specifically Italy's case. The Italian federal law, which is also known as the Stanca Act, aims to support access to information technologies for the disabled and addresses accessibility considerations in Italy. For ensuring that Italian government websites meet specific accessibility requirements, in this paper, we propose an evaluation strategy defined by an analysis of two validators: AChecker and VaMolà. 7,713 homepages were evaluated against WCAG 2.0 and Stanca Law recommendations. The analysis of results reveals relatively low web accessibility of municipal websites but highlights how to solve several of them is not a complex task also for non-technical users. For this reason, we developed a web application that allows municipality personnel to change the code of the homepage of a given municipality. All this can be made possible through the implementation of textual suggestions and the correct positional identification of the error within the HTML code of the page in question. Finally, the paper gives some directions on how to adapt the presented methodology for checking accessibility issues of local government websites of other countries.