The Usability and Content Accessibility of the E-government in the UK

Abstract

This study investigates the usability and content accessibility of today’s UK e-government websites and investigates whether they are ranked high in terms of accessibility and usability and if these two measures are correlated. The usability and accessibility of fifty selected UK e- government websites were measured using two automatic evaluation tools: Bobby and LIFT. Based on these automatic evaluation results, ten selected websites were further evaluated with expert evaluation methods: heuristics evaluation and cognitive walkthrough. Assistive technology was also used in the evaluation to assess the accessibility issues. The results show a relatively high compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and a relatively low usability rating for most UK e-government websites.