Towards less complex e-government services for people with low vision

Abstract

Online public services may alleviate many of the inconveniences citizens have to face when accessing public services in the real world. People with low vision are one of the collectives who could benefit from e-services the most, as they can be accessed anytime, anywhere and with the help of their usual assistive technology. Many public e-services are provided by means of accessing, completing and submitting an online-form. However, this process is not always accessible for people with low vision and completing all the steps often becomes a complex task. It is necessary to identify the most difficult tasks and steps in public services in order to improve the user experience in e-government services. This paper presents a user study of five public Spanish e-services with ten participants, five of them with low vision. The performance of participants during the process of fulfilment of the online forms has been analysed. The results indicated the main barriers they found in each step of the process and highlighted the best approaches for implementing more accessible e-services.