Web accessibility: a government's effort to promote e-accessibility in Thailand

"Web accessibility" was first officially introduced and studied in Ministry of Information Communication Technology in 2003. To support the idea of universal services (one stop for all), the government has been planning to develop an e-Government system that will provide all major services and official information on the internet (web based system). Since the issues to provide accessibilities for person with disabilities (pwds) become a major concern for modern information society. Accessibility becomes an important feature for all government websites, especially for websites that service to pwds. The preliminary survey on the government websites in 2003 showed a remarkably low standard of web accessibilities. Only 3 out of 267 government websites passed the test of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines on web accessibility. To support the promotion of web accessibility in Thailand, Assistive Technology Center (ASTEC) plays the important roles to provide necessary information and tools of web accessibility development for the government. This paper presents our works from the past to the current state of the project including: a development of the national guideline on web accessibility that is agreeable among web developers, a development of web accessibility evaluation tool, and a preparation of policy planning to promote web accessibility in Thailand.