Web site accessibility and quality in use: a comparative study of government Web sites in Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkey

• Published in: Universal access in the information society Vol. 16; no. 4; pp. 987 - 996
• Main Authors: Ismailova, Rita, Inal, Yavuz
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.11.2017; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Accessibility; Comparative studies; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Computers and Society; Electronic government; Information Storage and Retrieval; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); IT in Business; Long Paper; Search engines; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Visibility; Websites; Azerbaijan; Turkey; Kazakhstan; Kyrgyzstan; Government Web sites; Online evaluation tools; Accessibility; Web performance; Quality
• ISSN: 1615-5289; 1615-5297
• DOI: 10.1007/s10209-016-0490-z

Government Web sites aim to provide information to the citizens of the country; therefore, they should be accessible, easy to use and visible via search engines. Based on this assumption, in this paper, the ministry Web sites of four countries namely the Kyrgyz Republic, the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Republic of Turkey were analyzed in terms of accessibility and quality in use. Tests were carried out utilizing online automated tools. Results indicate that the usage rate of Information and Communication Technologies by the government is higher in Turkey, which affects the visibility of government Web sites but not their quality in use. Very few ministry Web sites of the four countries achieved AA conformance level on accessibility, many failed to pass conformance level A and AA checkpoints for accessibility errors. In order to ensure equal access to all their citizens, the countries in this study need to put more emphasis on designing government Web sites to be more accessible.