User Experience and Accessibility: An Analysis of County Web Portals

2. User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
Journal of usability studies (Vol. 9, Issue 1, November 2013 pp. 25-41)
How to audit web portal accessibility
Intoit articles (17, 14 -19)
Portals –It’s all about the User Experience
Jeanne Friedman, New Tilt Inc.
D4U
Faisal Imran
MS(IS&T)
Quaid-i-Azam university
Islamabad
2

3.  Website usability reinforces trust in e-government
 e-government are facing issues in usability and
accessibility
 This study applies usability heuristics and automated
analyses to assess accessibility and usability
 To assess usability, 14-point usability heuristic applied
 To assess accessibility, Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C)
HTML validator applied
 Mobile support also examined
User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
Introduction

4.  E-government web portal provide single point service
to citizens
 Web-based government services open the door for
using a customer-oriented approach to focus on end-
user “concerns and needs” to both engage and
empower citizens
 These portals should be accessible and usable by
citizen and support mobile driven readiness
User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
E-government Portal

5.  Website user experience focuses on site usability and
readiness to embrace and adapt to new
communication technologies such as mobile devices.
 Website should provide easiness to user to perform
task
User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
Usability in e-Government

6.  Users expect and have a right to accessible content
 Accessibility is making information accessible for
users with disabilities
 This study uses WAVE, a free automated tool for
evaluating site accessibility that has been used as an
indicator of web page accessibility in a range of
studies.
User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
Accessibility in e-Government

7.  For Positive user experience, provides the way user
prefer to use the website
 Separate style sheet should be used to provide portal
accessibility
 Lack of mobile access discourages the user
accessibility
User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
Mobile Devices and the Digital Divide

8.  Portal adoption
Higher numbers of residents might require more coordinated
websites to have a better user experience finding the resources they
need in a complex local government.(Google search for the county name
and Alabama, and examined the first 30 results)
 Usability
User should able to locate the information easily (14 usability standards
apply to measure this)
 Best coding practices
Accessibility standards, valid HTML, and the use of external style
sheets (WAVE and W3c tool used to measure this)
 New communication technologies
The widespread adoption of mobile Internet access by the general
population is still relatively recent (Examined HTML Code)
User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
Areas

9.  List of county web portal is compiled addresses for
the 67 Alabama counties
 Identified websites that serve as portals, only 39
Portal Identified, 1 Portal is not working
 Conducted a heuristic evaluation of the usability of
each homepage
 An automated evaluation of best coding practices is
conducted
 code of CSS for mobile devices examined
User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
Study Design

10.  Each county portal homepage’s accessibility using the
WAVE online accessibility tool
 Compliance with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
coding standards by submitting each county
homepage to the W3C’s HTML validation tool
 Categorized data into four primary areas: the
adoption of portals, usability, best coding practices,
and the adoption of new communication technology
User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
Study Design

11.  Total portal 39, one portal not working
 Out of 38 portals 58.2% have adopted web portals for
e-government (Portal Adaptation)
 81.6% portals used text links, 81.2% use navigation, and
39.5% change color after visit. On average, sites met
between 10 and 11 of the 14 tested usability
criteria(Usability)
 Only 10.8% had no validation errors (coding practices)
 Only 15.8% being prepared for support new
communication technology (new communication technology)
User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
Results

12.  Developers need to go beyond standards to make
sites universally usable
 Examining the adoption and use of style sheets for
mobile devices
User Experience and Accessibility:
An Analysis of County Web Portals
Recommendations

13. Thanks