Web accessibility investigation of Slovenian municipalities’ websites before and after the adoption of European Standard EN 301 549

Abstract

Digitalization and technological innovations provide many benefits for citizens worldwide, increasing the quality of life in several ways, including by enhancing access to information. However, people with disabilities can face challenges when retrieving online information as they often use assistive technologies that might not be fully supported by web pages. Municipalities’ websites are an important source of information for all citizens, regardless of their individual characteristics. To be able to support all citizens’ needs, several standards provide support for web developers. One of the standards is “Standard EN 301 549–Accessibility requirements suitable for public procurement of ICT products and services” in Europe. This study addresses the accessibility of public government services, more specifically municipalities’ websites, where there are still accessibility challenges. With a systematic literature review, we found no studies that would analyze the government web pages’ compliance with Standard EN 301 549. Therefore, this research had two main research goals: (1) to verify whether the websites of Slovenian municipalities were compliant with the Standard EN 301 549 in the years 2017 and 2018, and (2) to compare the results before and after the adoption of Standard EN 301 549 in Slovenia. The answers to the research questions were obtained with an accessibility evaluation of 189 Slovenian municipalities’ websites. The results, based on a descriptive analysis, indicate that, in 2017, none of the evaluated websites were fully compliant with the web content requirements of Standard EN 301 549, while at the end of 2018, 62 websites (33%) were fully compliant with the aforementioned standard. Furthermore, the results from an extended statistical analysis indicate improvement in websites standard compliance in 2018, even significant improvement for some web requirements after the adoption of the standard. A secondary contribution of this research is twofold: (1) a detailed presentation of the accessibility evaluation procedure and (2) its application on a specific domain (government domain) and in a specific geographical area (Slovenia). The same procedure could be applied to other domains and other countries around Europe (or even around the world in case Standard EN 301 549 is replaced with a relevant accessibility standard that applies to the chosen area of research).