Support resource based on standards for accessible e-Government transactional services

As the world moves towards an information society, it is not possible to consider the concept of e-Government that is restricted to the ability of just a few. At present, it is common to have to fill out forms electronically in order to carry out administrative procedures. The web interfaces of public transactional e-Services must be accessible by system users, regardless of whether they are disabled or not, according to the regulatory framework. This accessibility is not always taken into consideration in online forms in a process flow. One possible reason for this is the fact that guides are not available to assist in the design and evaluation of their accessibility. It is necessary for the transactional processes on Government e-Service websites to be accessible and well designed, in accordance with the current standards. In order to achieve this goal, the standard Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) must be complied with, according to legislation. However, these guidelines do not cover many of the obstacles faced by people with disabilities, as well as the general public, while filling out web forms, thus leaving accessibility problems undetected and unsolved. For this reason, web accessibility standards are not enough and should be supplemented by official government design patterns focused on transactional e-Services and online forms. In this article, we propose a support resource, which includes the accessibility criteria to be followed while designing and evaluating government transactional e-Service websites that incorporate online forms in the process flow. For the purpose of evaluating the reliability of the method and explaining it, a study was carried out on a sample of Spanish government e-Services used for making appointments in order to detect accessibility and design problems; this is presented as an example of good practices.