Disenfranchised or able to fully participate : access to New Zealand government web sites by the print disabled

Abstract

An empirical assessment of how accessible New Zealand government web sites are for the print disabled is a key democratic issue in light of the government's intention to move towards electronic information dissemination. This study reports on a 1997 accessibility audit of all government web sites and a sample of commercial sites in the New Zealand domain of the Internet. Commercial sites received a better accessibility score than government. Two thirds of government sites failed to meet the accessibility standard set by the Bobby online HTML accessibility validator. There was a trend for simpler sites with shorter download time and fewer hypertext links to be more accessible.