Website Optimization: eGovernment Site Credibility: Comparing Speed, Accessibility, Typos, and Validity

By Andy King
Website Optimization

In order to see how the US stacks up against the rest of the world online, we compared five english-based government sites for credibility. Credibility was measured using four metrics: speed, accessibility, typographic errors (see Figure 1), and (X)HTML validity. The results show that these countries fail nearly every test, except Section 508 (only India failed this test). This study and others (Mankoff 2005) show that by mandating compliance to a narrowly focused automated test, other problems invariably arise that degrade the credibility and usability of public websites.
For the full "eGovernment Site Credibility" article, see http://www.optimizationweek.com/reviews/egovernment/

Previous eGovernment Studies

Because they provide information to the general population including the disabled, government sites are some of the most scrutinized sites on the Internet. Even after Section 508 took effect, previous studies have found accessibility problems with government sites. As website complexity has increased, accessibility has decreased (Asakawa 2005). In a 2004 study only 22% of 50 random government home pages passed Bobby's Section 508 automated test (Ellison 2004). In a more recent study of 50 state home pages 98% did not meet the WCAG Level AA conformance, and only 70% met Level A requirements (Goette 2006).

However, automated studies give only an approximation of accessibility problems. Accessibility reviews with multiple users on screen readers received the best results among "lightweight" methods (Mankoff 2005), but still caught only 50% of known problems. Only a thorough review by an accessibility professional can give a definitive answer to a site's accessibility.

eGovernment Site Speed

To see how well the five government sites complied with the speed guidelines published in my book Speed Up Your Site (http://www.speedupyoursite.com) we analyzed government sites from Australia, Canada, the UK, the US, and India for download speed. The home pages were analyzed using our free Web Page Analyzer tool. The results of our analysis are listed in Table 1. For the full "eGovernment Site Credibility" article, see http://www.optimizationweek.com/reviews/egovernment/

Summary of Results

These government sites averaged 184,538 bytes in total home page size, with 31.2 HTTP requests. HTML contributed 32,297 bytes, with 24.6 images adding 104,994 bytes on average to the total payload. JavaScript and CSS usage varied widely. Canada and India used no external JavaScripts while the US used nearly 19K in 2 external scripts. CSS usage varied even more widely with India embedding all of their CSS within their HTML (zero external CSS files), to the UK with over 120K of CSS in 18 files! (see Table 1) Overall, the home pages averaged 15 seconds to load useful content, and 42.4 seconds to completely load on a 56Kbps modem.
For the full "eGovernment Site Credibility" article, see http://www.optimizationweek.com/reviews/egovernment/

Conclusion

In our opinion, all of the five government sites tested had credibility problems. All five sites failed our size and download time guidelines, all had typographic errors, all failed our accessibility tests and WCAG Level 3 (although only one failed Bobby's Section 508 test), and only one site, Canada, passed the W3C's (X)HTML validator.

The US had the fastest and smallest site with Canada and the UK the largest and slowest sites. Australia had the best accessibility score with India the worst including the most HTML errors. However, Australia also had the highest error rate with over one error for every 5 pages on average (over 20%) and the UK had the lowest error rate of one error every 92 page on average. There was no clear winner among these sites, all need some attention to boost credibility. For the full "eGovernment Site Credibility" article, see http://www.optimizationweek.com/reviews/egovernment/

Website Optimization News by Andy King, author of the popular book titled "Speed Up Your Site – Web Site Optimization". Web Site Optimization, LLC is a leading provider of web site optimization and search engine marketing services that "tune up" web sites for increased usability, conversion rates, traffic, and profitability. Click here for more information about Website Optimization