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Effect of human development level of countries on the web accessibility and quality in use of their municipality websites

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Abstract

This study aimed to explore the relationship between human development index (HDI) of countries and level of web accessibility and quality in use of their municipality websites. A list of 146 countries was obtained from the 2016 Global Human Development Report of the United Nations. Of these countries, 49 had a very high HDI, 42 had a high HDI, 33 had a medium HDI, and 22 had a low HDI. For the analysis of web accessibility and quality in use, the official municipality websites of capital cities of each country were found. These websites were tested using automated evaluation tools. The results showed that the global rank of municipality websites, their rank within the country of location, and percentage of incoming traffic within the country of location varied depending on their HDI. Furthermore, the number of websites that passed all WCAG 2.0 success criteria was very low. The analysis on whether the number of accessibility errors in the evaluated websites changed according to the country’s HDI showed that for conformance level A, representing the “must satisfy” checkpoints, the difference was significant. The municipality websites had fewer errors in countries with a higher HDI.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Yavuz Inal

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University, Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic

    Rita Ismailova

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  1. Yavuz Inal
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  2. Rita Ismailova
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Correspondence to Yavuz Inal.

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Inal, Y., Ismailova, R. Effect of human development level of countries on the web accessibility and quality in use of their municipality websites. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 11, 1657–1667 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-019-01284-4

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