Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 1:4 (2016), 50 ISSN: 2468-4376 http://www.lectitojournals.com
Web Site Accessibility, Quality and Vulnerability Assessment: a Survey of Government Web Sites in the Turkish Republic Yakup Akgul1* 1Dumlupınar
University, TURKEY *Corresponding Author:
[email protected] &
[email protected] Citation: Akgul, Y. (2016) Web Site Accessibility, Quality and Vulnerability Assessment: a Survey of
Government Web Sites in the Turkish Republic, Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 1:4 (2016), 50. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.20897/lectito.201650 Received: May 24, 2016; Accepted: September 30, 2016; Published: November 7, 2016
ABSTRACT Websites have evolved into an excellent medium of information dissemination and visibility. Hence governments and organizations around the world have websites as primary medium for information communication. The information in government web sites, which are widely adopted in many countries, must be accessible for all people, easy to use, accurate and secure. Since the web is an important resource of information for millions of people at all levels, accessible websites can help people with disabilities too to participate and contribute more actively in society. In recent years, many people have devoted their efforts to the issue of quality of Web site. The Quality and reliability of the e-government website is a crucial factor for the successful implementation of the information society. In this study the effectiveness of various design parameters (HTML errors, load time and browser compatibility problems etc.) on e-government website will be analysed by taking into considerations different website development standards recommended for them. The main objective of this study is to investigate the usability, accessibility and vulnerability of e-government web sites in Turkish Republic. Analysis was conducted using several automatic evaluation tools. The evaluation results show that the examined e-Government services have one or more accessibility issues. The results indicated that there is an urgent need to improve the design features of e-government website in order to be more effective and user-centric. The study also revealed security vulnerabilities in these web sites. Although the Turkish Ministry of Family and Social Policies as the framework for defining Web accessibility policy was launched at 2001, government web sites in the Turkish Republic have not been reviewed and still need great efforts to improve accessibility, usability and security. The author took 51 Government websites of Turkey, analyse their different parameters and on the basis of analysis shows their overall compliance with the standards and guidelines. With the help of the results obtained a table analysis of the websites is made by the authors that determine the effect of these parameters on the efficiency and accessibility of the government websites. Keywords: e-government, website design, website evaluation, website standards, website guidelines, vulnerability assessment INTRODUCTION The increasing use of information and communication technology in particular the Internet has become prominent and has the potential to change fundamentally how organizations work (La Porte et al., 2001). Internet provides an opportunity for governments to offer services to their citizens via websites. Government websites Copyright © 2016 by Author/s and Licensed by Lectito BV, Netherlands. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 1:4 (2016), 50 provide a platform for efficient communication and access to public information. They are a useful tool to transparency and democracy because they enable citizens to easily interact with their governments. E-government is defined as “the use of information technology (IT) by public sector organizations” (Heeks, 2006). E-Government helps overcome barriers of time and place and offers the citizens unprecedented access (Baker, 2009), (Becker, 2005). Governments today attempt to provide better-quality services, focus on citizens’ needs, embrace more efficient and effective work practices and improve the administrative processes. These goals motivate many governments throughout the world to develop various forms of E-Government, i.e. Internet websites and portals, which enable online access to government services and information (Lee and Cho, 2007). E-Government can be defined as the process by which the government can deliver services and information to its citizens via the internet (Al-Omari, 2006). Tang et al., (2011) states that “Government website helps to integrate government information resource, make government information public, increase administration efficiency, and promote the capability of government to serve the enterprise and citizen.” Similar to that of other developing countries, Turkey faces challenges in designing and implementing an e-government portal that reflects the definition of a true e-government system, which is “the use of Internet and related technologies to digitally enable government and public sector agencies’ relationships with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government” (Laudon and Laudon, 2010). As it can be seen from the definition, government services are targeted not only to citizens, but also to businesses, agencies, etc. According to the US General Accounting Office, six e-government categories include (Belanger and Hiller, 2006). With this variety of online services, the need for standardization arose and some requirements were developed. In Henriksson (2007), it was suggested to group the factors influencing the quality of government web sites into six major categories: (1) security and privacy; (2) usability; (3) content; (4) services; (5) citizen participation; and (6) features. Usability is one of the important characteristics making a product such as a web site or software usable and of quality. Web usability inspection examines the system to be tested for usability problems in its design and defines the severity of the usability problems and the overall usability of an entire design (Nielsen, 1994). Usually, in this kind of inspections, uploading speed and page size of the main page and number of broken links are tested (Nielson, 2000). Web site usability reinforces trust in e-government and that trust is a critical factor in citizenry using e-government (Huang et al., 2009). At the state and local level, however, e-government Web sites often have usability and accessibility problems (Ho, 2002), (Youngblood and Mackiewicz, 2012). These issues become further complicated as the way citizens access the Internet is changing. The Turkish Statistical Institute reports that over fourty-three percent of Turkish adults now own tablets (TUİK, 2015), and ninety-seven percent of Turkish adults use mobile phone (incl. smartphones) (TUİK, 2015). Thus, Web sites should be usable, accessible, well coded, and mobile-device ready. During the twelve months (April 2014-March 2015), 53.2% of Internet users interacted with public authorities over the Internet for private purposes (TUİK, 2015). The Internet has become an important source of information and communication all over the world. Lest accessibility seems like a minor issue, Internet statistics show that there are more than 2 billion internet users in the world. Out of these, 46,28 million Internet users are in Turkey (Internet World Statistics, 2013). Websites and web based user interface for applications are becoming very popular as a means of user interaction and spread of information among differently disabled people too. World Health Organization reports that there are approximately 785 million people who live with disabilities in the world (World Report on disability, 2011). Census 2011 has revealed that over 8.4 million people in Turkey are suffering from one or the other kind of disability. Out of these disabled in Turkey, 42.8 % are males and 57.2 % million are females. Among the five types of disabilities on which data was collected, percentage of visual disability was (8.4 %), motor disability (27.9 %), cognitive disability (29.2 %), speech (0.2 %), and hearing disability (5.9 %) (TUİK, 2015). In Turkey, steps have been taken to improve accessibility by government agencies. The Ministry of Family and Social Policies is responsible for ensuring that public Web sites, including state and local e-government sites, are accessible to all users, and has adopted WCAG guidelines to assist in doing so (MFSP, 2014). Nowadays websites and applications are important and integral to our daily life activities such as: education, employment, government commerce, health care and others. Vulnerability is a crucial point in government web sites. Most of the government websites not observing adequate security standards are extremely vulnerable to threats. Poor coding practices can make web applications vulnerable to attacks such as SQL injection and crosssite scripting, which can cause disruption of service and loss of data or bring the web application to a complete halt. In government web sites, consequences of such attacks can be disastrous. As a result, there are increasing concerns about the reliability and security of the developed websites and applications, in order to ensure that services will be provided to customers with the maximum possible security, to guarantee the integrity of the system and the privacy of online users.
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Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 1:4 (2016), 46 RELATAED WORKS Many studies on government web pages were conducted to examine accessibility and usability; fewer results are available for vulnerability assessments. Jati and Dominic (2009) tested the quality of e-government Websites in five Asian countries. Webmasters, Web applications developers, and Website quality assurance managers needed special tools and methods to be able to evaluate their own vision of quality attributes in the evaluated Websites. The researchers conducted some tests to measure the quality of e-government Websites in these countries. The results of their study showed the low quality and performance of these governmental Websites. Dominic, Jati and Kannabiran (2010) conducted some tests to measure the quality of e-government website of five Asian countries via web diagnostic tools online. Dominic et al. (2011) conducted test to measure the quality of e-government website of five Asian countries via web diagnostic tools online and proposed a methodology for determining and evaluating the best e-government website based on many criteria of website quality, consisting of linear weightage model (LWM), analytical hierarchy process (AHP), fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP), and one new hybrid model (NHM). Authors have used diagnostic to evaluate the Asian e-government websites in terms of technical aspects such as loading time, page rank, frequency of update, traffic, mark-up validation, accessibility errors, etc. Manhas and Mansotra (2011) conducted various tests on the website usage which includes response time, load time, size of a website and number of items, the structural aspect which includes code and link validation and content which includes link popularity. All the above factors were studied to measure the quality of e-Government websites of J&K state via different online service. The result of this study confirmed that almost all the e-Government websites of J&K state are neglecting performance and quality criteria. Manhas (2014) the effectiveness of various design parameters (such as page size, composition, download time etc.) on e-government website analysed. The author 10 Government websites of India analysed their different parameters and on the basis of analysis showed their overall compliance with the standards and guidelines. Akgül (2016a) indicated that there is an urgent need to improve the design features of e-government website in order to be more effective and user-centric. Akgül (2016b) conducted various tests on the website usage which includes response time, load time, browser compatibility and size of a website and number of items, the structural aspect which includes code, content and link validation. All the above twenty one factors were studied to measure the quality of e-Government websites of Turkey state via different online service. The result of this study confirmed that almost all the e-Government websites of Turkey state are neglecting performance and quality criteria. Wan Mohd Isa et al. (2011) investigated the usability and accessibility of Malaysia e-government websites. The usability measures were being measured by using Nielson usability guideline for the uploading speed and page size of the main page and number of broken links. Choudrie et al. (2004) reported the results of an evaluative study of a cross-section of e-Government portals from three perspectives (accessibility, quality and privacy) using a common set of performance metrics and Web diagnostic engines. Palma and Hong (2013) evaluated the current website performance of Belize’s e-government portal for a specific government ministry in terms of accessibility, quality, and privacy in order to meet the needs of Belize’s multicultural population. Some similar studies on usability, accessibility and performance of web sites and web contents were also conducted by (Asiimwe and Lim, 2010), (Ataloglou et al., 2009), (Atterer, 2008), (Büyüközkan and Ruan, 2007), (Baker, 2009), (Bowlby, 2008), (Dragulanescu, 2002), (Fasanghari and Habibipour, 2009), (Garcia et al., 2005), (Hanapi, Latif and Masrek, 2010), (Harrison and Petrie, 2006), (Holzer and Kim, 2007), (Horan et al., 2006), (Inglesant et al., 2005), (Ivory et al., 2002), (Jati, 2008), (Jati, 2011), (Jati, 2012), (Jiang and Ji, 2014), (Katre and Gupta, 2011), (Kituyi and Anjoga, 2013), (Lee et al., 2007), (Liu et al., 2010), (Parajuli, 2007), (Pribeanu et al., 2010), (Rababah et al., 2013), (Sharma et al., 2008), (Soufi and Maguire, 2007), (Stowers, 2002), (Szeróvay, 2011), (Venkatesh et al., 2014), (Wangpipatwong et al., 2005), (West, 2005), (Withrow et al., 2000), (Yan et al., 2007) and give suggestions for improvements. Past researches show that the website evaluation depends on the multiple factors (e.g. download delay, errors in pages, broken links, server response time etc.) that can be measured by the web diagnostic (Rogers et al., 2007), (Jati and Dominic, 2009). As for this study, it aimed to mainly assess the Turkish E-government websites in term to their usability, accessibility and vulnerability. THE SELECTED TOOLS Automated testing of websites is both an opportunity and a challenge; numbers of online services are there to check different quality criteria of a website by supplying different URL to them. Websites’ usability evaluation tools are used to evaluate the internal attributes of a website such as: loading time, HTML errors, browser compatibility problems and several others. Practically, it is difficult to evaluate these attributes without using the specialized tools. 3 © 2016 by author/s
Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 1:4 (2016), 50 Designers may apply these tools to detect errors that exist in the Website, try to fix them and help the Website designers to create high quality Websites. Some of the online services are launched by the organization who are continuously working on the website standards e.g. IBM, W3standards etc. Several tools were available online to evaluate websites according to several criteria and attributes. The tools that are used to evaluate the archived instances of the websites were: Fast Link Checker (2005-2009): for navigation usability tool which was used to assess the site’s broken link, “webpage speed analyser” Websiteoptimization to measure and evaluate the internal attributes of the Website such as response time, download time at different connection rates, size and number of items on a webpage, HTML Validator (1994-2009), The HTML Check tool is used to evaluate and calculate the number of HTML errors that exist on the Web page, such as coding errors, missing tags and others (NetMechanic). When these errors occur, the Web page may be displayed incorrectly. Eventually it will generate a report that summarizes its finding and shows where the errors occurred in the HTML code. To evaluate website quality both the HTML and CSS Validator, CSS Validator (1994-2009) codes based were used for the website to ensure it meets all the criteria of the W3C standard and achecker: for content quality and accessibility. achecker classifies the accessibility problems into the automatic problems, those in which the tool is certain that the problem violates the guidelines and manual problems, those that need to be reviewed by an expert. SortSite: for browser compatibility; it is used to calculate the number of compatibility problems for each website, websites privacy policy usage and readability, websitepulse for response time, Pingdom tool was used for load time. It is used to calculate the time required to load a page and its graphics, webaim: for current use of HTML5 and ARIA. Also, the NetSparker Community Edition Web Vulnerability Scanner and Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner 10.5 were used for security tests. According to Suteya et al., (2013), Ahmad et al., (2011) NetSparker is able to scan SQLI and XSS vulnerabilities without authentication, so it performed well in finding all possible vulnerabilities of these kinds. Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner had been developed since 1997, in order to detect and analyzed vulnerabilities. The free vision of this scanner crawls web site, automatically analyzes the web applications and finds only Cross site scripting vulnerability with high severity level. It measure only one type of the vulnerability which is the cross site scripting (XSS). THE METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY
A.
Sample Data
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The Selected Criterias
The evaluation process was conducted between 01 January 2016 and 15 January 2016. The time of evaluation is between 12 pm and 24 pm. Samples of 61 websites were selected by using convenient sampling from Turkey government portal. Since the objective of the study is to analyse the performance of various e-Government websites. The websites comprised of main institutions and e-services websites at the government level because the government is putting lot of efforts to IT enable all its departments and agencies to provide effective and efficient services to its citizens. An anomalous situation detected during the analysis: ten websites could not be analysed Designing websites needs careful thinking and a lot of planning. The most important thing is to know your audience. The designed pages have their own characteristics and these characteristics have certain drawbacks and benefits. The process of measuring the effects of the webpage components towards the performance and quality of website will measure the factors like response time (seconds), load time (seconds), page size (bytes), number of items, technology validation and links. There are many dimensions of quality; they were measured by different online services and also physically visiting the websites. In this study, the attributes that are related to websites design and development (i.e. navigability, content quality and accessibility, as well as browsers compatibility etc.) were considered. These attributes are described in details below. There is an instrument for measuring the effects of the webpage component toward the performance and quality of website. This instrument will measure the size, component, and time needed by the client for downloading a website. The main aspect that will influence this download time are page size (bytes), number and types of constituent, number of server from the accessed web. IBM that can be used as a standard for performance measurement of quality: Average server response time
