PREPRINT - Published in 2014 First International Conference on eDemocracy & eGovernment (ICEDEG):
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6819953
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICEDEG.2014.6819953
eGovernment and Web Accessibility in South
America
Sergio Luján-Mora
Department of Software and
Computing Systems
University of Alicante, Spain
sergio.lujan@ua.es
Rosa Navarrete
Faculty of System Engineering
National Polytechnic School,
Ecuador
rosa.navarrete@epn.edu.ec
Myriam Peñafiel
Faculty of System Engineering
National Polytechnic School,
Ecuador
myriam.penafiel@epn.edu.ec
Abstract— The number of e-government websites has
increased greatly in recent years. Many countries have laws to
ensure that e-government sites satisfy web accessibility
requirements. The objective of web accessibility is to ensure that
people with disabilities can access websites just like everyone else.
However, laws that enforce web accessibility do not automatically
guarantee compliance: e-government websites are not always
prepared to provide a correct service to persons with disabilities.
This paper analyses the accessibility of a group of e-government
websites of all South American countries and Spain. Three
official websites from each country has been analysed: the
government, the Parliament and the Senate websites. Different
automatic evaluation tools have been used to perform the
analysis. The preliminary results of our research show that the
majority of e-government websites do not provide adequate levels
of web accessibility.
Keywords— e-government; e-participation; e-inclusion; web
accessibility; universal access
I. INTRODUCTION
Currently, the World Wide Web (the Web) is present in all
areas of our lives, from accessing the Web to collect
information about different topics to using online services as
the electronic government (e-government). In a very short
period of time compared to the history of human beings, the
Web has become an essential part of our society and lives.
The number of e-government websites has increased
greatly in recent years because both national and local
authorities are realizing the benefits that online government
services may provide. According to Freeman & Loo [1], there
are three categories of benefits that governments can achieve
by developing websites for e-government: efficiency, user
convenience and citizen involvement. The citizen involvement
implies the participation of all the members of the society.
Nevertheless, some members, such as persons with
disabilities, can have difficulties to get involved.
The number of persons with disabilities accessing e-
government is growing, but e-government websites are not
always prepared to provide a correct service to persons with
disabilities. Many web users may encounter problems if e-
government websites do not achieve a minimum level of web
accessibility. Web accessibility usually refers to creating
websites accessible to all users who want to access them,
regardless of users’ disability. When websites are correctly
designed and developed, all users can have access to their
information and functionality. A simple definition of web
accessibility is “the property of a site to support the same
level of effectiveness for people with disabilities as it does for
non-disabled people” [2]. An alternative definition of
accessibility is “making web content available to all
individuals, regardless of any disabilities or environmental
constraints they experience” [3]. In summary, the objective of
the web accessibility is to ensure that people with disabilities
can access websites just like everyone else.
Some authors have examined the factors that most prevent
the adoption of e-government applications by citizens [4].
Some studies [5] highlighted that an obstacle to effective e-
government services was making those sites available to
persons with physical disabilities. Therefore, web accessibility
can be critical to promote e-government services among all
citizens. Providing equal access to people with different
disabilities (visual, hearing, cognitive, mental, and physical
impairments) represents a huge challenge for web designers
and web developers. Unfortunately, the lack of web
accessibility can convert e-government website into a new
source of digital divide [6].
Many countries have laws to ensure that e-government
sites satisfy web accessibility requirements. However, laws
that enforce web accessibility do not automatically guarantee
compliance. Therefore, it is needed to check the level of
compliance of web accessibility of e-government websites to
have a current diagnosis of the situation.
Some studies have been done to analyse the accessibility
of particular countries [7, 8, 9]. Other studies have analysed
and compared different groups of countries [10, 11]. However,
as far as we know, there is not any study that measures the
level of compliance with accessibility guidelines among South
American countries. In order to eliminate this gap, the
research presented in this paper examines the accessibility of
e-government web sites for South American countries.
In previous studies [12, 13], we have proposed a combined
methodology to evaluate the accessibility of websites. In this
paper, the result of a comparative study of the web
accessibility of official websites from South American
countries is presented. Besides, Spain has also been included
in the comparison. The aim of this study is to provide
evidence and analysis to help understand and compare the
level of compliance of accessibility guidelines by South
American countries. For each country, three official websites
from each country has been analysed: the government, the
Parliament and the Senate websites.
II. WEB ACCESSIBILITY AND EVALUATION TOOLS
Web accessibility primarily benefits people with
disabilities. However, as an accessible website is designed to
meet different user needs, preferences, skills and situations,
this flexibility can also benefit people without disabilities in
certain situations, “such as people using a slow Internet
connection, people with temporary disabilities such as a
broken arm, and people with changing abilities due to aging”
[14]. In addition, an accessible website can help people who
have limited access to certain technology, such as old
computers or slow Internet connections.
In 1999, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), a project
by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 1.0
[15]. These guidelines were widely accepted in many
countries around the world as the definitive guidelines on
creating accessible websites. However, on 11 December 2008,
the WAI released the WCAG version 2.0 [16] to be up to date
while being more technology neutral. In both versions,
conformance to the WCAG is based on four ordinal levels of
conformance (none, A –the lowest–, AA, and AAA –the
highest–). Level A includes checkpoints that are essential: in
other words, if these checkpoints are not met, then even
assistive technology cannot make content accessible.
Therefore, a web content developer must always satisfy these
checkpoints. Level AA includes checkpoints that remove
significant barriers to accessing web documents: if these
checkpoints are not satisfied, one or more groups of users will
find it difficult to access web documents. Finally, level AAA
includes checkpoints that are not essential: satisfying these
checkpoints will improve access to web documents.
Most countries have been using the WCAG 1.0 guidelines
as reference to enforce their compliance with the principles of
web accessibility. In most cases, level AA was selected as the
minimum level required to guarantee web accessibility.
However, WCAG 2.0 was approved as an ISO/IEC 40500
International accessibility standard in October 2012 [17]. This
means that more countries can formally adopt WCAG 2.0 and
many countries are updating their laws to the new version.
Verifying the accessibility of a website can be a time
consuming task and requires expert evaluators to validate the
results. Automatic evaluation tools such as AChecker, A-
Prompt, Cynthia Says, EvalAccess 2.0, eXaminator, TAW 1.0
and 2.0, Total Validator, and WAVE 4.0 have been the
pioneers and are the most well-known, due to their usability,
ease of use and its quick results.
Automatic tools generally verify the presence of a valid
element or attribute, such as the alt attribute (alternative text)
or the label element (description of a form control). However,
human judgment is also needed, because some questions are
very relevant, such as whether or not the value of the alt
attribute clearly and effectively conveys the function of the
image. For example, there is a big difference between the
alternative text that an active or inactive image needs. Indeed,
in some cases an image may not need an alternative text (null
alt text).
A recent study [18] tested and compared the capabilities of
six automatic current web accessibility evaluation tools, by
analysing their coverage, completeness and correctness with
regard to WCAG 2.0 conformance. The conclusion was that
relying on only one automatic evaluation tool was an error
because none of the analysed tools obtained the best scores in
all the dimensions studied. For example, some tools exhibited
high completeness scores and low correctness scores at the
same time. Therefore, a web accessibility analysis based only
on automatic evaluation tools should include the results of
different tools in order to achieve reliable results.
III. WEB ACCESSIBILITY LEGISLATION IN SOUTH AMERICA
Several countries around the world have introduced
legislation about the persons with disabilities and their rights.
Regarding web accessibility, some legislation directly
addresses the need for accessible websites, whereas other
legislation addresses the more general requirement for people
with disabilities not to be discriminated against.
In South America, some countries still do not have any law
regarding web accessibility. Other South American countries
have some kind of recommendations that mention
accessibility, but nothing mandatory. As far as we know [19],
the following South American countries have laws that
enforce web accessibility:
• Argentina: Law 26,653 of accessibility of
information on web pages (2010).
• Brazil: Decree 5,296, of general rules and basic for
the promotion of accessibility to disabled persons or
persons with reduced mobility (2004).
• Chile: Supreme Decree 100, technical standard for
developing web sites of public administration (2006).
• Colombia: Law 1,680, which guarantees the access to
information by blind and low vision people (2013).
• Peru: Ministerial Resolution 126-2009-PCM,
approves guidelines for accessibility of web pages
and applications for mobile phones for public
institutions of the National System of Information
(2009).
• Venezuela: Resolution 026, accessibility guidelines
(2011).
Other countries, such as Ecuador, are working on
developing their own laws and standards. For example,
Ecuador recently published their web accessibility standard
based on ISO/IEC 40500:2012 [20], but they still do not have
a law that says how the standard should be applied.
IV. METHOD OF ANALYSIS
In this study, the 12 South American countries have been
analysed and compared: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,
Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam,
Uruguay and Venezuela. The two dependent territories,
French Guiana and Falkland Islands have not been analysed
because they do not have their own government websites.
Besides, Spain has also been included in the analysis in order
to compare the results with a country outside South America.
The reason to include Spain in this analysis is twofold: on the
one hand, Spain has had laws enforcing web accessibility for
more than 12 years; on the other hand, Spain belongs to the
group of “developed countries”, whereas the other countries
belong to the group of “developing countries”. Therefore,
Spain can be used as a reference or baseline in our analysis.
Three official websites from each country has been
analysed: the official website of the government; the official
website of the Parliament (lower house); the official website
of the Senate (upper house). The main criterion to decide the
government websites to be compared was to use the most
representative websites of each country.
There are a number of differences between the national
parliaments of the South American countries, owing to the
various historical developments of each country and recent
reforms. Therefore, all the analysed countries have a
bicameral system, except Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Surinam,
Uruguay and Venezuela. Table I shows the whole list of the
websites analysed in this research.
The home page of each one of the websites has been
analysed from three points of view: HTML and CSS validity;
web accessibility; and, current use of HTML5 and ARIA.
The home page of a website is the first contact a user has
with the website. If the home page shows problems or is not
accessible, it would be very difficult that a disabled user can
access other pages of the website. Therefore, it is essential to
ensure the accessibility of the home page of a website.
All the tests of a web page were conducted during the
same day in order to avoid changes in its content.
A. HTML and CSS Validity
Two automatic evaluation tools have been used to evaluate
the validity of the HTML and CSS of the websites. The first
tool is the Markup Validation Service, a free service by the
W3C [21]. This tool checks the markup validity of web
documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc.
According to the W3C [22], “Validating web documents is an
important step which can dramatically help improving and
ensuring their quality, and it can save a lot of time and
money”. The result of the Markup Validation Service is
summarized in the number of errors and warnings in a web
page. The second tool is the CSS Validator Service, another
free service by the W3C [23]. This tool compares the style
sheets of a web page to the CSS specifications. It can find
errors, typos, or incorrect uses of CSS; it can also detect when
CSS poses some risks in terms of usability.
B. Web Accessibility
Five automatic evaluation tools have been used to evaluate
the accessibility of the websites analysed in this study:
AChecker, eXaminator, TAW, Total Validator and WAVE.
TABLE I. E-GOVERNMENT WEBSITES ANALYSED
Argentina
Government
http://www.casarosada.gob.ar/
Parliament
http://www.diputados.gov.ar/
Senate
http://www.senado.gov.ar/
Bolivia
Government
http://www.presidencia.gob.bo/
Parliament
http://www.diputados.bo/
Senate
http://www.senado.bo/
Brazil
Government
http://www2.planalto.gov.br/
Parliament
http://www2.camara.leg.br/
Senate
http://www.senado.gov.br/
Chile
Government
http://www.gob.cl/
Parliament
http://www.camara.cl
Senate
http://www.senado.cl/
Colombia
Government
http://wsp.presidencia.gov.co/
Parliament
http://www.camara.gov.co/
Senate
http://www.senado.gov.co/
Ecuador
Government
http://www.presidencia.gob.ec/
Parliament
http://www.asambleanacional.gov.ec/
Guyana
Government
http://www.op.gov.gy/
Parliament
http://www.parliament.gov.gy/
Paraguay
Government
http://www.presidencia.gov.py/
Parliament
http://www.diputados.gov.py/
Senate
http://www.senado.gov.py/
Peru
Government
http://www.presidencia.gob.pe/
Parliament
http://www.congreso.gob.pe/
Spain
Government
http://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/
Parliament
http://www.congreso.es/
Senate
http://www.senado.es/
Surinam
Government
http://www.president.gov.sr/
Parliament
http://www.dna.sr/
Uruguay
Government
http://www.presidencia.gub.uy/
Parliament
http://www.parlamento.gub.uy/
Venezuela
Government
http://www.presidencia.gob.ve/
Parliament
http://www.asambleanacional.gob.ve/
AChecker [24] is an online free service that produces a
report of accessibility problems according to different
guidelines (Section 508, WCAG 1.0, WCAG 2.0). AChecker
classifies accessibility problems into three categories: known
problems (problems that have been identified with certainty as
accessibility barriers), likely problems (problems that have
been identified as probable barriers, but require a human to
make a decision) and potential problems (problems that
AChecker cannot identify, that require a human decision).
AChecker also provides an Application Programming
Interface (API) that allows remote accessibility analysis.
eXaminator is an online free service to check the
accessibility of a web page developed by Carlos Benavídez
[25]. eXaminator checks the application of the WCAG 2.0
[16] on the HTML and CSS contents in a web page and
summarizes the results in an overall score from 1 to 10 that is
quite easy to understand by everybody. Of course, the score
calculated by eXaminator is a fast check of accessibility, but
automatic evaluation does not cover all of the success criteria
in WCAG 2.0.
TAW is a limited online free service to check the web
accessibility against WCAG 1.0 and 2.0 [26]. TAW classifies
accessibility problems into automatic problems, those in
which the tool is certain that the problem violates the
guidelines and manual problems, those that need to be
reviewed by an expert.
Total Validator is an HTML validator, an accessibility
validator, a spell checker, and a broken links checker, all
included into one tool [27]. This tool is provided in two
versions: the basic tool for free and the professional tool that
must be purchased.
Finally, WAVE is an online automatic evaluation tool that
helps web developers to make their web content more
accessible [28]. However, WAVE cannot completely state if a
web page is accessible, only a human can determine true
accessibility. WAVE detects HTML5 and Accessible Rich
Internet Applications (ARIA) features, such as <header>,
<footer>, ARIA landmarks and roles, and so on. Besides,
WAVE also provides an API that allows automated and
remote accessibility analysis of web pages using the WAVE
processing engine.
C. Current Use of HTML5 and ARIA
The use of HTML5 is an example of modern technology in
the development of a website. Although the first draft of
HTML5, the latest version of HTML, was published by the
W3C in January 2008 [29], six years later the use of the new
version of the markup language of the Web is not very
common yet. According to the W3C’s plan, HTML5 is
expected to be completed and published at the end of 2014.
HTML5 addresses some areas that had not been
adequately defined in previous versions. Besides, HTML5
updates the specification to include latest advances and best
practices in web development that have appeared in the past
few years. HTML5 also includes new accessibility features
that will improve the accessibility of websites.
On the other hand, ARIA, another standard of the W3C,
addresses the lack of accessibility of many web pages. With
ARIA, developers can make advanced websites and web
applications accessible and usable to people with disabilities.
Unfortunately, many web developers do not know the
existence and the purpose of ARIA.
Nowadays, the combined use of HTML5 and ARIA
defines a new way to make web content and web applications
more accessible to people with disabilities. Therefore, the use
of these technologies is critical.
D. Limitations
Web accessibility testing studies how websites with
accessibility barriers affect the way users with disabilities use
the Web. Web accessibility evaluation tools and expert
inspections cannot substitute user testing, because the
difficulties of understanding all the interactions between web
content and assistive technology.
V. RESULTS
A. HTML and CSS Validity
Table II shows the HTML and CSS validity results. A
colour code is used to clarify the results. Errors represent the
number of validation errors: the lower the value, the better the
validation. A dark green colour represents a better level of
validation (lower number of errors), whereas a dark red colour
represents a worse level of validation (higher number of
errors). The pure red colour without numbers indicates an
anomalous situation detected during the analysis: two websites
could not be analysed, the website of the Parliament of
Guyana and the website of the Parliament of Venezuela.
Only the website of the Government of Guyana had 0
validation errors. According to the metadata tags that appear
in the HTML code of Guyana’s Government website, the web
page is created by the Content Management System Joomla!
1.5. The following websites with the less number of HTML
errors were: the Government of Spain with 1 error, the
Parliament of Chile with 4 errors, and the Parliament of Brazil
and the Senate of Brazil, both with 5 errors.
The worst results were obtained with the website of the
Senate of Argentina, with 889 errors, and the Parliament of
Argentina, with 350 errors.
Regarding the CSS validation, the best results were the
website of the Government of Spain and the website of the
Parliament of Uruguay with 0 errors. On the opposite side, the
Government of Paraguay presented the highest number of
errors with 641.
B. Web Accessibility
Due to the lack of space, we cannot include the whole
results of the web accessibility analysis. Therefore, Table III
summarizes the number of problems detected with automatic
evaluation tools and some information has to be discarded.
This table follows the same colour schema as Table II: a dark
green colour represents a better level of accessibility (lower
number of barriers), whereas a dark red colour represents a
worse level of accessibility (higher number of barriers).
Unfortunately, the home pages of all the websites have
accessibility issues.
In Table III, column “AChecker” represents the number of
“known problems” that have been detected. According to
AChecker, these problems should be fixed. “Likely” and
“potential errors” have not been included in the table.
Column “eXaminator” shows the global score provided by
this tool, a value from 1 to 10: the higher the value, the better
the accessibility of the web page.
TABLE II. HTML AND CSS VALIDATION RESULTS
Column “TAW 1.0 P1” indicates the number of issues to
pass the WCAG 1.0 priority 1 (A level) requirement that can
be automatically detected. The manual errors have been
discarded because they required additional human
intervention. Column “TAW 2.0 Problems” provides the
number of problems that should be corrected because there is
a certainty about them. “Warnings” and “Not verified
problems” have also been discarded and they are not showed
in the table. Column “TV Errors WCAG 2.0 A” shows the
number of errors of WCAG 2.0 priority 1 (A level) detected
by Total Validator. The other errors have been discarded.
Finally, column “WAVE Errors” provides the number of
errors detected by WAVE. “Alerts” have also been discarded.
In general, the worst results regarding web accessibility
were obtained with the websites of the Parliament of
Argentina and the Parliament of Venezuela. On the other side,
the best results were obtained with the websites of the
Parliament of Brazil and the Government of Guyana.
C. Current Use of HTML5 and ARIA
The DOCTYPE is a declaration that always has to appear
at the very top of HTML documents. This declaration defines
the type of document, tells the browser what element to expect
as the top-level element, and identifies the version of the type
of document. According to the results of W3C’s Markup
Validation Service [21], only 6 web pages (18%) have the
HTML5 DOCTYPE: the Government and Senate of Chile, the
Government of Colombia, the Government of Ecuador, the
Government of Paraguay and the Parliament of Surinam.
TABLE III. ACCESSIBILITY RESULTS
Regarding the use of ARIA, WAVE [28] has been used to
detect ARIA features in the analysed websites. Only 6 web
sites (again 18%) present some use of ARIA: the Senate of
Argentina, the Parliament of Brazil, the Government and the
Senate of Chile, the Government of Colombia, and the
Government of Ecuador. For example, this last website makes
use of: one header (<header>), one footer (<footer>), three
navigation sections (<nav>) and four ARIA landmarks
(complementary, contentinfo, banner, and navigation).
VI. DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORK
An accessible website is one which can be used by all its
intended visitors, taking into account their differing
