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Managing accessibility in local e-government websites through end-user development: a case study

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Abstract

This work discusses accessibility problems concerning content creation and publication on e-government websites, and proposes an approach based on end-user development (EUD) techniques to overcome them. To deal with the huge and diverse amount of documentation to be published, content management systems (CMSs) are usually adopted in government institutions to support content creation by a large set of publishers, who typically have no competencies in information technology. This paper proposes the integration of EUD techniques in CMSs in order to limit CMS personalization and, at the same time, relieve publishers from managing the low-level details of content representation. To demonstrate the validity of the approach, a case study research has been performed by involving some employees of the Brescia Municipality in Italy. The results of the study confirm the positive impact of EUD techniques on content accessibility and publishers’ work practice, and suggest their possible use in more sophisticated tasks.

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Notes

  1. We do not report here the name of the CMS to keep our discussion general and neutral.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. They also thank P. Baroni for his suggestions during the paper revision. The authors are finally indebted to the publishers of the Brescia Municipality for their availability in participating in the case study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Elettronica per l’Automazione, Università di Brescia, Via Branze 38, 25123, Brescia, Italy

    Daniela Fogli

  2. Settore Informatica, Comune di Brescia, Via Lamarmora, 230, 25124, Brescia, Italy

    Sergio Colosio

  3. Dipartimento di Elettronica per l’Automazione, Università di Brescia, Via Branze 38, 25123, Brescia, Italy

    Matteo Sacco

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  1. Daniela Fogli
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  2. Sergio Colosio
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  3. Matteo Sacco
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Correspondence to Daniela Fogli.

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Fogli, D., Colosio, S. & Sacco, M. Managing accessibility in local e-government websites through end-user development: a case study. Univ Access Inf Soc 9, 35–50 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-009-0158-z

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