Managing accessibility in local e-government websites through end-user development: a case study

This work discusses accessibility problems concerning content creation and publication on e-government websites, and proposes an approach based on end-user development (EUD) techniques to overcome them. To deal with the huge and diverse amount of documentation to be published, content management systems (CMSs) are usually adopted in government institutions to support content creation by a large set of publishers, who typically have no competencies in information technology. This paper proposes the integration of EUD techniques in CMSs in order to limit CMS personalization and, at the same time, relieve publishers from managing the low-level details of content representation. To demonstrate the validity of the approach, a case study research has been performed by involving some employees of the Brescia Municipality in Italy. The results of the study confirm the positive impact of EUD techniques on content accessibility and publishers’ work practice, and suggest their possible use in more sophisticated tasks.