Accessibility-in- use of public e-services: An exploratory study including users with low vision

Accessibility of public websites and e-services is essential for the development of e-Government. The provision of barrier-free public e-services would ensure the inclusion of all people and would especially benefit people with disabilities who would be able to perform administrative tasks electronically. Many studies have been carried out to evaluate the accessibility of public e-services. However, most of these studies rely on manual and automated evaluation and do not involve people with disabilities. In this paper, we present an accessibility-in-use evaluation based on an exploratory study of five public e-services with ten participants, five of whom were people with low vision. The preliminary results discussed in this paper reveal accessibility-in-use barriers for most of the participants but particularly for those with low vision even if the selected e-services claim to conform to existing accessibility standards and did not present critical accessibility issues according to the expert evaluation carried out. The results highlight some particular aspects to be considered for developing more accessible public e-services.