Web Access Centre

EU eAccessibility Report

Summary: EU eAccessibility Report: The UK Cabinet Office has published a detailed report into the accessibility of public sector websites in the EU. The report was researched and written by a consortium of organisations including RNIB.

RNIB collaborates with AbilityNet, Dublin City University and Socitm to produce Cabinet Office report

On 24 November the UK Cabinet Office published "eAccessibility of public sector services in the European Union", a comprehensive report on accessibility of government online services across the European Union (EU). The publication of the report was announced at the ministerial eGovernment Conference in Manchester.

The report was commissioned by the Cabinet Office for the UK Presidency of the EU to help member states by undertaking an evaluation of eAccessibility and establishing the scope of public policy towards eAccessibility.

The research was carried out by a partnership led by the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) and including AbilityNet, Dublin City University, the Society for Information Technology Management (Socitm) and RNID.

The report revealed that only three per cent of the 436 online public service websites assessed achieved WAI Single-A standard. A further 10 per cent achieved limited Single-A, and 17 per cent only marginally failed to achieve Single-A. None of the websites tested reached the higher WAI Double-A standard.

The full report is available on the Cabinet Office website and as an accessible PDF file for printing / offline reading.

Note: the Cabinet Office website has been experiencing problems over the past couple of days, and may be temporarily unavailable. Until the Cabinet office server becomes more stable, we are making the PDF version of the report available here. Please check to see if the Cabinet Office website is available first though!

• eAccessibility of public sector services in the European Union (PDF, 1MB)
• Thread discussing the report on Accessify Forum

Content author: webaccess@rnib.org.uk

Last updated: 08/04/2008 18:38