Accessibility of eGovernment Web Sites: Towards a Collaborative Retrofitting Approach

Abstract

Accessibility benchmarking is efficient to raise awareness and initiate competition. However, traditional benchmarking is of little avail when it comes to removing barriers from eGovernment web sites in practice. Regulations and legal enforcement may be helpful in a long-term perspective. For more rapid progress both vendors and web site maintainers are willing to take short-term action towards improvements, provided that clear advise is available. The approach of the eGovernment Monitoring project (eGovMon) integrates benchmarking as a central activity in a user-driven project. In addition to benchmarking results, several other services and background information are provided to enable the users – in this case a group of Norwegian municipalities who want to improve the accessibility of their web sites – to gain real added value from benchmarking.