Easy-to-read Meets Accessible Web in the E-government Context

In the e-government context, content of information and service systems needs to be accessible and easy-to-read. E-government systems are increasingly self-service systems. If the content of these systems is incomprehensible, citizens are not able to exercise their rights or fulfill their duties. Comprehensibility, however, is more than just providing text that is easy to read. The ease-of-understanding of a text is a result of the interplay between content characteristics, reader characteristics and task/context characteristics, as is the case for usability. This multi-faceted form of accessibility cannot be assessed and evaluated with just the existing easy-to-read guidelines. Measuring ease-of-understanding, which is a legal requirement for e-government systems and other public services, requires a process-oriented approach besides the currently available product-oriented easy-to-read guidelines.