Assessing the Usability and Accessibility of Malaysia E-Government Website

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INTRODUCTION
With the expansion of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) globally, many peoples opt to conduct official communications with the government by using the web technology. The web technology provides various benefits of changing the way people study and becomes a tool for government sectors to provide information and services to citizens. There is growing research on accessibility as such for older people (Nasir et al., 2008) and visually impaired person (Nordin et al., 2009). However, these web technologies are not perfect in terms of usability and accessibility. People with physical disabilities such as sight and hearing disabilities might face problem to access and use that website. To solve the usability and accessibility problems, innovative designs are being required for web developer to make their web site more usable and accessible by everyone including people with disabilities (Lee et al., 2007). Among well-known guideline for accessibility and usability is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) (Robbins, 2006) and Nielson usability guideline (Nielson, 1994;2000). Thus, the main objective of this study is to investigate the usability and accessibility of Malaysia egovernment websites with reference to the WCAG 1.0 and Nielson usability guideline by using quantitative measures and automatic evaluation tools.
Literature review: E-Government term: In general, the term "e-government" is defined as "streamlining government by providing efficient and effective services and information to citizens and business through advanced technology" (Blackstone et al., 2005). It presents a way for governments to provide convenient access to services via Internet and wireless communication technology (Siau and Long, 2006).
As shown in Table 1, there are growing numbers of research on e-government studies in various parts of  (Becker, 2008) Accessibility of Alabama government sites (Potter, 2002) regions, worldwide. In Malaysia, the E-government projects are closely monitored by Malaysian Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) of the Prime Minister's Department (Ahmad Bakeri, 2008). One of the MAMPU initiatives is My Government portal (http://www.gov.my). The portal is being used for citizens accessing government information and online services and received nearly 6.5 million visitors, as of May 2008 (Ahmad Bakeri, 2008). However, the state of the accessibility level of federal, state and local authorities listed inside the portal is yet to be unknown.

Usability traits:
There are growing interests of research of usability measurement in website (Wan Abdul Rahim, et al., 2009a;2009b;. Usability of a system is indicated with ease of learning, efficient to use, easy to remember, low usage error rate and pleasant to use (Nielson, 1994). The usability measures are being measured by using Nielson usability guideline for the uploading speed and page size of the main page and number of broken links (Nielson, 2000). In terms of speed, Nielson (2000) studies showed that users beg to speed up page download (Nielson, 2000). Nielson (2000) also noted the work of Robert at the Fall Joint  (Robbins, 2006) No Guideline 1 Provide equivalent alternatives to auditory and visual content. 2 Don't rely on color alone. 3 Use markup and style sheets and do so properly. 4 Clarify natural language usage 5.
Create tables that transform gracefully. 6.
Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully. 7.
Ensure user control of time-sensitive content changes. 8.
Ensure direct accessibility of embedded user interfaces. 9.
Provide context and orientation information. 13.
Ensure that documents are clear and simple.
Computer in 1968 in which it the minimum of ten seconds, is about the limit time for keeping user's attention focused on navigating the site. With relation to page size attribute, there is a need to keep page size below 34 KB for modem users (Nielson, 2000).
Website accessibility: In general, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defined web accessibility as "accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with the web". The W3C has produced a set of international standards for the design of accessible Web content -the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) (Robbins, 2006). Published in 1999, WCAG 1.0 has become an important reference for web accessibility for web community (Centeno et al., 2005), influencing policy and legislation (Alexander, 2003) and have been used for developing accessibility authoring and checking tools (Tillett, 2001). WCAG 1.0 is an internationally accepted standard that consists of 14 guidelines that provide specifications on how to develop an accessible site (Thatcher, 2002). These 14 guidelines are divided into Priority 1, 2 and 3 checkpoints, with Priority 1 being the most important. According to Cartel and Markel (2001), the number of checkpoints varies between guidelines (Carter and Markel, 2001). Table 2 shows the 14 guidelines, specified by WCAG 1.0 (Robbins, 2006). Each guideline includes one or more checkpoints with 65 checkpoints in total. The checkpoints are categorized into three priority levels based on the checkpoint's impact on accessibility. Checkpoints under the same guideline may be categorized into different priority levels (Thatcher, 2002): Priority 1 (16 checkpoints): A Web content developer must satisfy these checkpoints specified in Priority 1. Otherwise, it will rather difficult for user to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able to use the Web documents.
Priority 2 (30 checkpoints): A Web content developer should also satisfy these checkpoints specified in Priority 2. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will remove significant barriers to accessing Web documents

Priority 3 (19 checkpoints):
A Web content developer may address this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or more groups will find it somewhat difficult to access information in the document. Satisfying this checkpoint will improve access to Web documents. However, for the scope of the study, we only focus on error or automatic tests for Priority 1 and Priority 2

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The evaluation process was conducted between 15 August 2009 and 10 September 2009. The time of evaluation is between 10 pm and 12 am. Samples of 155 websites were selected by using convenient sampling from Malaysia government portal (http://www.malaysia.gov.my). The websites comprised of federal government and state government Table 3 shows the composition of the 155 websites in term of their administrative level (Federal/State). The accessibility evaluation process was done by using automatic evaluation tool, EvalAccess 2.0 which is limited to only WCAG 1.0 guidelines. The usability evaluation is websiteoptimization tool; http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ to assess the uploaded speed and page size for the main page. In addition, axandra usability tool which is available at http://www.axandra.com/free-online-seotool/broken-link-checker.php was used to assess the site's broken link.

RESULTS
Overall usability results: The usability testing includes speed, page size and broken links traits which are based on Nielson (2000) related guideline to web usability (Nielson, 2000). However, only 134 out of 155 websites can be analyzed for usability using the  aforementioned tools due to inaccessibility of the site during evaluation period. In general, the observed data from Table 4 shows that the overall usability traits used by the Malaysian e-government websites are quite poor. More than 90% of the Malaysia e-government websites have uploaded time duration of more than 10 seconds and have existence of broken links. In addition, 125 of the Malaysia e-government websites have main page size, uploaded in more than 34 KB. These results prove that usability traits are less than being considerate in Malaysia e-government web design by website developer.
Usability results for federal and states government website: As shown in Table 5, only speed 1.44Mbs and broken links are valid and meet the assumption for the data interpretation as suggested by Pallant (2008) for cross tabulation analysis. The findings also revealed that websites under state government may need to increase the accessibility level of the sites compared to federal government websites due to the high number of accessibility errors reported in this study. This assumption is based of the comparison made with the percentage of error showed for State websites are higher than federal websites for the checklist shown in Table 5.
Accessibility analysis on e-government website: Table 6 and 7 revealed the accessibility analysis and summary description of the violated accessibility checkpoints based on the sampling of 155 websites. However, 7 critical checkpoints had being identified as among being highly violated by Malaysian  To protect the anonymity and confidentiality of the name of government websites with critical error, only the type of the government websites are being reported in this study. The next results report the listing of top 5 government websites with these 7 critical errors.
E-Government website with high critical error for checkpoint 1.1 (Image, Alt): According to Table 8, state government websites lead the highest error ranking by having 136, 107 and 105 numbers of errors for "Checkpoint 1.1 (Img, Alt)", respectively. However, federal websites tops the error ranking with 139 errors. Table 9 shows the number of errors for websites that violate "Checkpoint 3.4 (Table, Border)". Federal websites is leading the errors with 104, 97, 87 and 83 errors. In general, websites from federal government dominates the Table 9 by violating the checklist the most as compared to state government.

E-Government website with high critical error for checkpoint 3.4 (Table, Cell Padding):
The websites with high critical error for "Checkpoint 3.4 (Table, Cell Padding)" are vividly displayed in Table 10, which reports Federal websites to have significant 104, 96, 90 and 82 errors, respectively. Here, the websites from federal government also dominates the Table 10 by violating the checklist the most as compared to state government websites. Table 11 reports federal websites tops the error ranking with 62 errors. However, the websites from states government dominates the Table 11 by violating the checklist the most as compared to federal government with 48, 42 and 40 errors.

E-Government website with high critical error for checkpoint 10.1 (A, Target):
In general, Table 12 shows federal websites dominating the error ranking. The federal government websites with critical errors for "Checkpoint 10.1 (A, Target)" are being reported in the Table12 with 141, 80, 65 and 64 errors, respectively.         Accessibility error (federal/state): As shown in Table 15, only checkpoint 3.4, checkpoint 10.1, checkpoint 11.2 and checkpoint 12.4 are valid and meet the assumption for the data interpretation as suggested by Pallant (2008) for cross tabulation analysis. The findings also revealed that websites under federal government may need to increase the accessibility level of the sites compared to state government due to the high number of accessibility errors reported in this study. This assumption is based of the comparison made with the percentage of error showed for Federal websites are higher than state websites for the checklist as shown in Table 15.

DISCUSSION
Ensuring accessibility and usability of the service provided for people with disability should be among key aspects of Malaysian e-government. There is a need to raise the level of awareness towards increasing the number of accesses and usable participation of all Malaysian citizens. The results showed that there is a high number of usability (speed and number of broken links) and accessibility problems for state website upon comparing to federal website. Thus, further improvement has to be made by web developer so that the e-government websites are more accessible and convenient to use. Relevant government readiness assessment model (Al-Omari and Al-Omari, 2006) may be feasible to provide grounding assessment.

CONCLUSION
The findings reported in this study may alert web developer for Malaysia e-government websites to give more emphasis on specific accessibility and usability features which are often being neglected. The limitation of this study is on the quantitative measure used to assess accessibility which is only subjected to WCAG 1.0 guideline. This is due to the limitation on the availability of the automatic tool that supports WCAG 2.0. Future research should also consider evaluating the website accessibility based on WCAG 2.0 guidelines. The issues and recommendations highlights for further improvement of the usability and accessibility level in government websites may also be taken into consideration towards ensuring that e-government delivers for all citizens especially for citizens with disabilities.