Darrell M. West, director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University, and a team of researchers examined 1,620 state and federal sites. The researchers analyzed 1,559 state sites (or an average of 31 sites per state) plus 48 federal government legislative and executive sites, and 13 federal court sites. Research was completed during June and July, 2005. Previous e-government studies were released in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004.
Arkansas’ overall ranking is 45th. The report shows that Arkansas was ranked 11th in 2005. (See link for full report.)
Websites are evaluated for the presence of various electronic features, such as online publications, online databases, audio clips, video clips, foreign language or language translation, advertisements, premium fees, user payments or fees, disability access, several measures of privacy policy, multiple indicators of security policy, presence of online services, the number of online services, digital signatures, credit card payments, email addresses, comment forms, automatic email updates, website personalization, PDA accessibility, quality control, and readability level.
The results show that progress has been made on several fronts. In terms of online services, 73 percent of state and federal sites have services that are fully executable online, up from 56 percent last year. In addition, a growing number of sites offer privacy and security policy statements. This year, 69 percent have some form of privacy policy on their site, up from 63 percent in 2004. Fifty-four percent now have a visible security policy, up from 46 percent last year. Eighteen percent of sites offer some type of foreign language translation, compared to 21 percent last year.
In terms of disability access for the visually impaired, automated software available from Watchfire, Inc. found that 44 percent of federal sites and 40 percent of state sites meet the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) disability guidelines. The federal numbers are up from 42 percent in 2004, while the state numbers are up from 37 percent last year.
There are also a number of quality control issues on public sites. To measure these quality problems, we used Watchfire's WebXM to analyze each of 71 federal agency websites. WebXM is an enterprise solution that automates the scanning, analysis, and reporting of online security, privacy, quality, accessibility and compliance issues across websites.
For this project, its Quality module was used to scan a random sample of 5,000 pages from each agency and identify online quality issues that affect the user experience, such as broken links and anchors, broken links, missing titles, missing keywords, missing descriptions, warnings and redirects and poor search functionality. Nearly every agency has problems with content, search, and design.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Monika Rued
Quelle/Source: Today's THV, 21.08.2006
