Inclusion and Accessibility News Portugal Rated 2nd in the UN on Government Websites Accessibility Portugal Rated 2nd in the UN on Government Websites Accessibility
- 03/05/2011
An article published in the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, under the title "Global Web Accessibility Analysis of National Government Portals and Ministry Web Sites" presented the first comprehensive analysis of the Web accessibility of 192 Member States of the United Nations (UN).
Portugal is ranked 2nd in the accessibility of government websites in the study, with a value of 97.57% of Web accessibility, surpassed only by Germany which has a value of 98.72% of web accessibility.
Accessibility of Government Websites of UN Member States (top 50)
% of tests conformant with the accessibility guidelines on all performed websites of the national government and 5 ministries
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Note: Pages selected from national governments and 5 ministries websites: Education, Labour, Social Affairs, Health and Finance.
Source: Morten Goodwin, Deniz Susar, Annika Nietzio, Mikael Snaprud, Christian S. Jensen,
Global Web Accessibility Analysis of National Government Portals and Ministry Web Sites
Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 8, 41–67, 2011
The study, authored by Morten Goodwin (Tingtun AS, Norway), Deniz Susar (Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the UN), Annika Nietzio (Institute of Research on Technology and Disability, Germany), Mikael Snaprud, Christian S. Jensen (Aarhus University, Denmark), analized the accessibility of websites of governments of the UN Member States considered in the 2010 UN e-government Survey, which includes the websites of national governments and the websites of five ministries: Education, Labour, Social Affairs, Health and Finance. Accessibility for people with special needs was assessed based on the W3C – World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0).
For each of the considered websites a set of pages was analyzed (the study does not clarify how many pages were considered and how they were selected) and each page has been tested regarding conformity with all occurrences relevant to the WCAG 1.0. The study considers a value for each country web accessibility equal to the percentage of tests that yielded positive results in the total accessibility tests performed on the evaluated pages.
Values were obtained in this way for accessibility levels for all UN Member States except for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) because its government has no public presence on the Internet.