Website Accessibility Evaluation of the Federal Government of Nepal

Abstract Website accessibility concerns easy and all-time access to information from the website for all people. The constitution of Nepal provisioned equal access to information to all people as a fundamental right. The ICT policy and website directive of Nepal also target equal access to all government websites. This paper attempted to evaluate the websites of 25 high-level institutions of the federal government websites of the government of Nepal for website accessibility based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 guidelines provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and some provisions of Government website development and management directive, 2021. This research uses web-based online tools such as SortSite for WCAG 2.1 conformance test; WAVE to evaluate contrast error and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) errors; W3C markup validation service for HTML validation; and W3C CSS validation service for CSS validation. The results were found unsatisfactory with only 4% of the websites of the federal government of Nepal being confirmed to the level "A" and "AAA"; only 24% of websites are contrast and ARIA error-free; only 4% of websites are passed in HTML and CSS validation. However, the websites are somehow satisfactory when evaluating them against the website directive, 2021. Therefore, the federal government should implement an integrated website management system in all institutions, which should conform to WCAG guidelines.