Towards a more accessible e-government in Jordan: an evaluation study of visually impaired users and Web developers Iyad Abu-Doush a , Ashraf Bany-Mohammed b *, Emad Ali c and Mohammed Azmi Al-Betar d a Computer Science Department, Yarmouk University, Irbid 21163, Jordan; b CIS Department, Middle East University, Amman 11610, Jordan; c Special Education Department, Jordan University, Amman 11942, Jordan; d School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 USM, Penang, Malaysia (Received 8 August 2010; final version received 23 September 2011) Accessibility of e-government services is a key issue for people with disabilities. E-government services can significantly save lot of their effort and provide them with lot of easy to reach services. Yet, accessibility of e-government websites is still under-explored topic in Jordan. In order to understand the accessibility of e-government websites and its problems, this study evaluates a set of e-government websites using 20 blind and visually impaired volunteers and at the same time conducts a survey on e-government websites developers. The results from e-government websites accessibility evaluation are compared with expert’s review. For both the evaluation and the survey we used a set of accessibility guidelines developed by W3C [i.e. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0)], Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998, and other literature review. In order to evaluate a reasonable number of e-government Web sites, a set of common e-government websites visited by the blind community were identified and a set of specific common tasks to test were defined. The analysis of the research results revealed a serious weakness in understanding, adopting and implementing Web accessibility guidelines throughout nearly all Jordanian e-government websites. Improving awareness, training developers and users, and developing formal guidelines of Web accessibility are needed to enable visually impaired and blind users in accessing e-government Web sites and their services. Further research analysis discusses and identifies key areas in which e-government accessibility can be enhanced. Keywords: Web accessibility; e-government; evaluation; Jordan 1. Introduction Web accessibility refers to the degree to which Web information is accessible to all human beings and automatic tools. The goal of Web accessibility is to allow universal access to information on the Web, by all people but especially people with any impairment, no matter what its severity, (e.g. blindness, low vision, deafness, hard of hearing, physical disabilities or cognitive disabilities) (Paris 2006). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Disabled Persons established a commitment from the governments to give people with disabilities equal rights to access different facilities provided to the society (United Nations Enable 2010). It also stated that measures should be taken to guarantee the accessi- bility of technologies and the accessibility of physical environment. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an organisation for standardisation the Web. It provides a set of accessibility recommendations called Web Contents Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). These guidelines entail a set of recommendations for Web developers to provide a Web contents which are universally accessible (i.e. can be accessed by people with different kinds of disabilities). Another set of rules are introduced in Section 508 (2010), which require that the electronic information for the US government must be accessible to people with disabilities. With the integration of information and commu- nication technologies (ICT) in every detail of our everyday life, government became under pressure to provide ICT-based services through what is referred to as e-government. The automation of government services by making them available online is performed by many countries. In accordance, Jordan launched the e-government programme to deliver high-quality and cost-efficient governmental service to the whole community. In Jordan the e-government portal is an ambitious project for providing government services *Corresponding author. Email: ashraf_bany@yahoo.com. Current affiliation: MIS Department, Ha’il University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis Behaviour & Information Technology, 2013 Vol. 32, No. 3, 273–293, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2011.630416