EVALUATING GOVERNMENT WEBSITE ACCESSIBILITY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Because of the aging society, web accessibility will become more important, especially for the disabled people. Even though efforts have been made to reduce the informational gap resulting from web inaccessibility, websites from virtually every type of organization have major accessibility problems. This study used an automated software tool to evaluate the accessibility of four Korean government and four US government websites. The web accessibility problems found were manually verified by both human experts and an assistive technology. Results were compared between the Korean and the US government websites and between the websites published in 2004 and 2007. Finally, how much accessibility of the Korean and the US government websites has improved during 2004–2007, common web accessibility problems, and potential errors from the automated software tool are discussed.