Accessibility Evaluation on Malaysian E-Government Websites

The advent of the WWW has caused a dramatic evolution in getting the information. From the web, most of the people nowadays can get information easily from Internet from anywhere and anytime. These Web sites also become an important tool that the government used to market their institution to prospective customers and, to provide government information and services available on-line. To make these web sites more functional, they must be accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. This study was undertaken with the purpose of identifying the accessibility of e-government websites based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In addition, the study was also intended to investigate webmaster’s knowledge and practices pertaining to accessibility. The result of the analysis indicated that there were no single Malaysian e-government websites that passed the W3C Priority 1 accessibility checkpoints. A follow-up study using interviews unveiled that most webmasters did not fully adhere to the standard of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).