Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

New Survey Highlights Lack of Gov’t Website Accessibility

Achieving E-Government for All: Highlights from a National Survey, published October 22, by Darrell M. West, Director, Taubman Center for Public Policy, Brown University.

  • More than 1,600 local, state and federal websites were reviewed using the free Bobby Accessibility Test.
  • Several key facts: government data is increasingly migrating to the web; more than 100 million Americans are not online, more than 50 million Americans have “some level of disability,” and 90 million adults are identified as “low literate.”
  • “Information on most government websites is skewed to the needs and abilities of highly educated English speakers.”
  • “…47 percent of federal sites satisfied the W3C standard of accessibility, 33 percent of state sites did and 20 percent of city government sites met the test. With the stricter Section 508 guidelines, 22 percent of federal sites were in compliance, compared to 24 percent of state sites and 13 percent of city websites.”
  • Sorry, comments are closed for this post.