Public Affairs

AUK hosted a lecture as part of its Faculty Speaker Series, entitled, Web Accessibility: The Case of Kuwaiti E-government, which is based on a study conducted and presented by Dr. Iyad Abu Doush, associate professor of computer science at AUK. 

Dr. Abu Doush's talk started with an introduction about the barriers that people with disabilities face including environmental barriers, attitudinal barriers, and electronic/technical barriers. He mentioned that people with disabilities can overcome the electronic barrier by using assistive technologies which are hardware or software tools that help people with disabilities. 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a set of standards proposed by W3C to enable web developers to create accessible web content that can be accessed by everyone, including people with disabilities. For example, if a web page has an image, the WCAG requires providing text alternatives for any non-text content. This means that web developers must provide an alternative text that describes the image. The availability of such text description can help blind users when they use the screen reader to access the content of the web page. 

Dr. Abu Doush mentioned that the objective of this study is to evaluate the web accessibility issues facing people with disabilities in Kuwait to identify problems, enhance government awareness, and promote inclusion. The study applies different technical dimensions to investigate accessibility problems using automatic tools and experts’ manual reviews. The overall results show that most of the evaluated E-government websites lack conformance to accessibility standards. Unfortunately, thirteen out of seventeen (i.e., 76%) of the evaluated E-services are impossible to use. The most failed accessibility success criteria are: "non-text content" and "labels or instructions".
 
Dr. Abu Doush said, "There is a need to develop appropriate policies and laws and set a national-level plan to enforce the adoption of the national accessibility guidelines and WCAG standards for better inclusion to all residents and citizens of Kuwait."

The talk concluded with a Q&A session with the audience. Moving forward, another study can be applied to see if there is an improvement in the level of accessibility of Kuwaiti E-government services. 

Click here, to read Dr. Abu Doush’s published work about this topic.

 

 Images from the event