Web Accessibility as a Barrier to Successful Digital Governance: A Case Study of the Arabian Gulf Region

Conformance to web accessibility standards is crucial to successful digital governance. Examining the state of Web accessibility compliance in the state of Qatar, a fast growing digital economy with the world's highest per capita GDP has many lessons for emerging economies. Our audit of a selected sample of websites across government and other sectors suggests the need to raise awareness among executives and other key stakeholders regarding Web accessibility and to develop best practices and an improved po licy framework. To better understand the barriers to adoption of Web accessibility standards in the country, we interviewed 30 CIOs and senior information technology managers. The results suggest a need for stronger regulations, since organizations will not otherwise comply due to concerns that enforcement of accessibility standards results in increased website development time and costs and undermines usable website design and management, particularly with multilingual websites.