Website accessibility evaluation of the federal government of Nepal

Website accessibility concerns easy and all-time access to information from the website for all people. The constitution of Nepal provisioned equal access to information to all people as a fundamental right. The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy and website directive of Nepal also target equal access to all government websites. This paper attempts to evaluate 25 federal e-government websites of the government of Nepal for website accessibility based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and some provisions of Government website development and management directive 2021. This research uses the web-based online tool SortSite for the WCAG 2.1 conformance test; WAVE to evaluate contrast error and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) errors; W3C markup validation service for HTML validation; and W3C CSS validation service for CSS validation. The results found unsatisfactory with only 4% of the websites of the federal government of Nepal conformed to the level A and AAA; only 24% of websites are contrast and ARIA error-free; and only 4% of websites are passed in HTML and CSS validation. However, the websites are relatively satisfactory when evaluating them against the website directive 2021. Nepal government should establish a web accessibility team to fix identified issues related to WCAG 2.1 as a short-term solution and update existing website policies to incorporate WCAG guidelines as a long-term solution.

Automated summary

This paper evaluates the accessibility of 25 federal e-government websites in Nepal and finds that the majority of the websites fall short in meeting the WCAG 2.1 standards, contrast and ARIA errors, and HTML and CSS validation. However, the websites fare relatively well in terms of compliance with the website directive of 2021. The Nepal government is recommended to establish a web accessibility team and update existing website policies to ensure better accessibility.