An effort of the Swiss government to promote the monitoring of e-accessibility

Switzerland is obliged by law and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to make digital services in the public sector inclusive. Furthermore, barrier-free access to digital services is the main objective of the Swiss digital strategy, which aims to ensure the participation of all Swiss residents. In Switzerland, the accessibility of electronic offerings and services in the public sector has not been systematically measured to date. This study, therefore, examines the extent to which public sector institutions in Switzerland comply with the accessibility requirements for websites using the simplified testing method. Using conformance assessment tools and as well as self-written scripts, which allow an automatic check of accessibility requirements and thus the testing of a larger sample, 245 websites were tested in our case study. We paid regard to select websites from different government levels as well as sectors to observe heterogeneity among them regarding e-accesbility maturity. The results revealed that the websites from the administration sector obtained relatively better e-accessibility audit outcomes. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the difference is not so significant. So, one would say that the e-accessibility maturity is not sector dependent. That is, there is no significant heterogeneity among different public sectors and government levels regarding their websites’ e-accessibility auditing results. A piece of policy advice would be to make them salient as well by communicating their importance for disabled people. As previous research shows, making a concept more salient leads to an improvement in its consideration to be necessary.