The Accessibility, Usability, Quality and Readability of Turkish State and Local Government Websites an Exploratory Study

Abstract

With significant development in Internet technology contributing to daily lives in nearly every aspect, it is important that government websites and e-government services offered through them are used effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily. Achieving accessible, usable, qualified, and readable e-government services that enable citizens to fulfill different users' requirements by everyone involved in the target group, implying a lack of equality between disabled and non-disabled people in benefiting from online governmental services regardless of time and location constraints, has become a global aim. This study investigated whether the websites of the state and local level e-government in the Turkish Republic comply with prevailing standards of accessibility, heuristic usability, mobile readiness, performance and, the readability of website content with six different indices and whether these qualities depend on the type of the government websites. After examining 77 state and 247 local e-government sites, the results indicate that the Turkish government websites have made many of the accessibility, usability, quality, and readability mistakes as predicted. In light of the study findings, this paper will present some recommendations for improving Turkish government websites, as well as discuss future implications.