EVALUATION OF THE ACCESSIBILITY OF KENYA E-GOVERNMENT WEBSITES IN THE NAIROBI CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT

Purpose : The purpose of this study was to evaluate the accessibility of Kenya E-Government Websites in the Nairobi Central Business District. Methodology: This study adopted a descriptive survey design. The targeted population of this study was all cyber cafes management/owners and their users. This study used stratified random sampling. A sample size of 384 respondents was used. The questionnaire was the instrument for data collection. Questionnaires were issued to the respondents through self-introduction. Frequencies, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used. Microsoft excel were also used to complement SPSS. Results: This further means that ICT literacy influenced Government websites accessibility as supported by a p value of 0.000. Results also revealed that ICT delivery channel influenced Government websites accessibility as supported by a p value of 0.000. Further, results revealed that disability was statistically significant in explaining or predicting the accessibility of e-government websites as evidenced by p value of 0.000. Unique contribution to theory, practice and policy: The study recommends that Government website should accommodate facilities for persons with disabilities. It is therefore recommended that Government policy makers should review existing knowledge disseminations regulations within Government with the aim of relaxing regulations on information dissemination. This will build a culture of information openness between the Government and citizens. In other words the Government should maximize information dissemination through their websites.


Background of the Study
The use of the internet provides an opportunity for governments to offer services to their citizens via websites.Government websites 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.
A study survey carried out by Choudrie and Dwivedi (2005) inspected citizen awareness and accessibility of e-government services in the UK.They found that 76 percent ofthe respondents were not even aware of the "government gateway" in the UK.The study showed thatonly 6 percent of the respondents in the sample had registered for the "government gateway." According to Gallant(2007), in the US the proportion of citizens adopting e-government services had been growing at a high rate.It was found that in 2005, 52 percent of tax payers filed their tax forms electronically.Nevertheless, this proportion is far from the aim of having 80 percent of tax returns filed electronically by 2007.
According to the UN (2010), most developed countries benefit from e-government services, but there is still much room for improvement globally.Many challenges involved in the adoption of e-government services still exist, which leads to the low levels of the adoption of e-government services universally.Numerous researches like UN (2010); Cater and Weerakkody(2004) have suggested the necessity for more research in the area of e-government adoption.The above discussion shows that governments across the globe still face problems from the citizen's perspective, which demonstrates the need for studies that investigate the adoption rate of egovernment services.Many prior studies focus on accessibility although the two concepts are complementary design philosophies which overlap each other (Alexander, 2006).The primary focus of accessibility is access by people with disabilities while usability focuses on the elements of learn ability, memo ability, effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction for all website users (Henry, 2002).Usability aims at satisfying the users -a reason why users' cultural contexts are considered when designing usable websites (Hillier, 2003).All in all "accessibility is a subset of a more general pursuit: usability" Henry ( 2002) because websites may be technically accessible but hard to use.Since accessibility is a subset of usability, usability represents an important aspect in the development of government websites.
The attainments of e-Government in Kenya is a milestone and has been one of the top agenda for the Government in an effort to engineer and propel the realization of national development goals and objectives for Wealth and Employment Creation, as stipulated in the Kenya Vision 2030.The Government of Kenya established the e-Government Programme in June 2004.It has since then committed itself towards achieving an effective and operational e-Government to facilitate better and efficient delivery of information and services to the citizens, promote productivity among public servants, encourage participation of citizens in Government and empower all Kenyans (GoK, 2012).
The Kenya e-Government Strategy is designed to achieve pre-determined set of goals and objectives, which are: better and efficient delivery of Government information and services to the citizens, promote productivity among public servants, encourage participation of citizens in Government and empower all Kenyans in line with development priorities outlined in the Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth and Employment Creation (GoK, 2012).

Statement of the Problem
A number of perspectives are found in literature about the adoption of e-government.
Researchers focus their studies on a number of different aspects of e-government (Coursey& Norris, 2008).Studies across various disciplines present varying perspectives about information technology and society, the Internet and social change, technology and institutional transformation.These perspectives represent a variety of views about research on electronic communication, in general, and e-government in particular.
Optimists claim that e-government leads to citizen empowerment through improvement of government relations with citizens.Others support claims that e-government has a major role in the transformation and improvement of public sector operations (Kumar and Best, 2006).Welch (2004) say that e-government enhances government accountability, La Porte (2000) says that it has greater efficiency in service delivery, access of information for citizens, while Pina (2007) claims that e-government improves opportunities for cross collaboration and information resource sharing between government agencies, businesses, citizens and other stakeholders.
According to Pina (2007), the success of e-government services depends on government support as well as on citizens' ability to use and access its websites.This therefore means that website accessibility is two pronged with the Government and citizens playing their respective role to enhance web accessibility.This study seeks to explore accessibility from a user/citizen point of view with and sought to provide feedback to the Government in order to enhance web accessibility.This study sought to fill this twined web accessibility gap by exploring the challenges and barriers of e-government services from the user's perspective by evaluating the level of accessibility of Kenyan Government Websites among cyber users in Nairobi city.The accessibility will be evaluated in terms of the websites contents and the ease of access by users within the Nairobi City.

Research Objective
The objective of this study was to evaluate the accessibility of E-Government websites in the Nairobi Central Business District.

Modernization Theory
Modernization theory hypothesized a direct relationship between mass communication and the process of changing traditional societies to modern ones.The dissemination of developmental information, mostly following the model in western industrial countries, was expected to have the effect of transforming traditional societies into modern ones.Schech (2002)argued that the promises of new technologies for developing countries, formulated within the broader discourse of modernization and development, is premised on the assumption that a deficiency in knowledge is responsible for underdevelopment.Information and communication technologies are seen, through this perspective, as a means for the diffusion of knowledge and information required for development.This view is, in many ways, similar to the view of the radio as a conduit for the diffusion of western knowledge to the rest of the world which characterized early modernization thinking.
McQuail (2000) views modernization as the process of spreading education.This concurs with Schech (2002), who assert that ICTs are comparable to the radio in their respective periods and they demonstrate a continuity of modernization thinking; however, ICTs represent a shift from centralized state-led development to a decentralized vision of development that empowers citizens for greater participation in government.Pioneering studies such as Lerner's (1958) suggested that exposure to national and international media eased the transition for Middle Eastern populations from traditional to modern societies.Studies by Schramm (1964)  In this study the concept of modernization theory being used is that of the first wave that pertain to economic development.Technological advancement has been credited to social change in a society.Modernization theory helps to explain the public role of the Internet café business models which drive the wave of modernization in the towns and rural areas.

Empirical Review
The United Nations (UN) estimates that approximately 10% of the world's populations are persons with disabilities (over 650 million people), of which 80% live in developing countries (UN, 2007).A sizable number of disabled users are using services available on the Internet, such as e-government sites.A study by the UK Office for Disability Studies in 2007 found that 27 percent of disabled users gave one of the reasons for accessing the Internet as the ability to access government or official services (Williams, Copestake, Eversley& Stafford 2007).The capability to use government Web services is an important way to enhance the empowerment of disabled persons and to be fully included in society.There are two frameworks that are used to enhance the accessibility of Web services, including e-government sites: industry standards and legal mandates.
In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995 requires providers of goods and services to provide equal access to all customers, including accessibility to information services such as Web sites and the use of communications (Blues, 2001).However, most UK government sites do not meet minimum levels of accessibility.In 2005, a report produced by the Cabinet Office found that 97% of official sites were unusable by disabled people, largely because they ignored well-known techniques for making data accessible (BBC News, 2007).
According to Carter and Belanger (2005), the success of e-government depends upon the citizens levels of ICT literacy.Governments across the world need to investigate and understand the factors that influence or could encourage citizens to use e-government services instead of traditional communication.Governments still face the problem of a low-level of ICT literacy of e-government services by their citizens.
Language is perceived to be one of the most challenging barriers to overcome in order to reach high levels of customer-citizen satisfaction.Since English has become the preferred language to communicate in the information highway, English is the official and widely used language among the leading countries in the implementation of e-Government.As reported by the United Nations (2005) 68% of the current web content is in English a language spoken by 5.4% of the world population causing a major language divide (Tamez &Al-Sharieh, 2009).
Comparisons of the size and capabilities of infrastructures reveal considerable differences between developed and developing countries.Developed countries have the infrastructure levels and capabilities to make Internet and telephone access available to almost all of their residents, some with populations over 300 million.The insufficient infrastructure of developing countries, because of economic conditions and governmental regulations of telecommunications industries hinder the progress of e-government in these countries (Howard, 2007).

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This study adopted a descriptive survey design.The targeted population of this study was all cyber cafés management/owners and their users.This study used stratified random sampling.A sample size of 384 respondents was used.The questionnaire was the instrument for data collection.Questionnaires were issued to the respondents through self-introduction.Frequencies, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used.Microsoft excel were also used to complement SPSS.

Response Rate
The initial target sample for the study was 384 respondents which were classified into two strata of cyber owner and cyber users.There were 384 questionnaires which were distributed to the cyber owners and users as laid on Table 1.

Age Distribution
Respondents were asked to indicate their ages.Figure 1 shows the results.

Figure 1: Respondents Age
Based on the analysis presented on Figure 1 majority of the respondents had ages lying between 18 years to 45 years which comprised of 78% of the respondents.This indicates that majority of the cyber owners and users are young people which again relates to the age of the internet and digital revolution.This is supported by an exploratory study done by Bringula, Bonifacio, Natnaum, Manuel, and Panganiban (2012:149) to determine the profile and pattern of internet usage of respondents in cyber cafés in Manila.It was found that 73% of internet users were your people who were below 20 years and were mostly students.

Education Level
Figure 2 shows results on education level of the respondents.

Figure 2: Level of Education
Based on the results presented on Figure 2, majority of the cyber users and owners had levels of education beyond secondary school.This could be explained by the fact that in Kenya the main language used on the internet is English which is an international language and hence could only be used by a literate person.

Years of Internet Usage
Figure 3 presents results on internet usage experience.

Figure 3: Internet Usage Experience
Figure 3 shows that most of the internet users and cyber owners had used internet for a period of between 5 to 10 years.This results are consistent with the number of years that -internet has been available to the public.

Data Analysis and Discussion
This section contains a presentation and discussion of the data analyses.The results are organized based on the study variables and objectives.Results indicate that 79% of the respondents were aware of various government websites in Kenya, 76% agreed that Government websites provided important information and 70% agree that they were using government websites regularly whenever they wanted to deepen their knowledge on government services.Seventy sixty percent disagreed that it was possible to make enquiries with Government website, 68% disagreed that Government websites were interactive while 53% disagreed that Government services were well elaborated on each ministry's website.On a 5 point scale, where 1represented strongly disagree and 5 represented strongly agree, the mean score of the responses was 3.12 indicating a higher overall level of agreement with the questionnaire statements by the respondents.The overall standard deviation was 1.19 which indicates that approximately 68% of the respondents were spread within one standard deviation from the mean.These findings indicate that many of the internet users in Kenya are aware of the existence of Government websites.The findings are in line with the general public information regarding the unfriendly nature of Government of Kenya websites.

Government Websites Accessibility
The findings agree with those of Choudrie and Dwivedi(2005:5)who carried out a citizen awareness and accessibility of e-government services in the UK.They found that 76 percent of the respondents were aware of the "government gateway" in the UK.The study showed that only 6 percent of the respondents in the sample had registered for the "government gateway."

ICT Literacy and Government Websites Accessibility
The first objective of the study was to establish whether ICT literacy affected accessibility of Government websites in Kenya.The analysis of the responses is presented on Table 3. Results indicate that 83% of the respondents agreed that they were regular users of government websites while 68% agreed that their friends who were not computer literate were not aware of the existence of Government services on websites.Sixty seven percent agreed that most of their The results above indicate that Language was key a factor to having better accessibility to Government websites.According to Tamez and Al-Sharieh (2009) 94.6% of the population worldwide was not of native English speakers, which causes a major impact and threatens the advancement of e-Government.He stated that it was time for governments to seriously consider internationalization in the global delivery of information and services.
Table 5 displays results of the third objective which analyzes the disability and accessibility of Government websites.strong and positive correlations with website accessibility.The positive correlations mean that a unit change on the predictor variables resulted to a positive change in Government website accessibility.Delivery channels had a strong and positive correlation of 0.675 which means that a unit change in delivery channels led to a positive change in website accessibility.On an overall basis it can be concluded that the variables of the study had strong to moderate correlations.

Regression Analysis
Data analysis was also done using a linear multiple regression models in the form of; In the model,β 0 = the constant term while the coefficient β i = 1….4wasused to measure the sensitivity of the dependent variable (Y) to unit change in the predictor variables.µis the error term which captures the unexplained variations in the model.
Where Y = Government website accessibility which is the dependent variable of the study, X 1, X 2, X 3 and X 4 represent; ICT literacy, website language, disability and delivery channels respectively which are the independent variables.Table 8 shows the initial regression results regarding the robustness of the regression model in explaining the study phenomena.The composite correlation between the dependent and the independent variables is 0.928 which is a positive and a strong correlation.The coefficient of determination also called R square is 0.860 (86%).This means that the independent variables (ICT literacy, website language, disability and delivery channels) of the study explain 86% of the variations in the dependent variable (Government website accessibility) while the rest is explained by other factors or variables not captured in this current study.
saw the European Journal of Technology ISSN xxxx-xxxx (Paper) ISSN XXXX-XXX (Online) Vol.1, Issue No.1, pp 36 -55, 2016 www.ajpojournals.org40 media as a way of expanding the horizons of traditional societies while Pye (1970) saw a role for communications in the political development of new countries.While modernization theory has been discredited in recent times, the idea of communication for development has remained a crucial model for studying developing countries.Roman (2005:311) suggested that the study of communication phenomena is relevant for developing countries where social change and modernization (driven by dissemination of information) are expected to take place.Studies of the impact of the Internet, therefore, are, partly, based on the underlying discourse of communication for development.The argument of these discussions is that modernization remains a dominant underlying approach to the framing of the role of ICTs in development.Modernization theory perceived development as spreading from the west to the rest of the world aided by modern communication technologies.In this view of ICTs for development, ICTs are considered vital to the production and transfer of knowledge for development by governments to communities in developing countries.

Table 1 : Response Rate Category Issued Questionnaires Returned Percentages
Table 2 displays results of data analysis regarding the views of the respondents on accessibility of Government websites.

Table 5 : Disability and Website Accessibility
Results indicate that 82% of the respondent disagreed with the statements that Government websites cater for the visually impaired citizens and 75% of the respondents disagreed that Government websites are well-equipped for accessibility by users with hearing impairments.

Table 9 : Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
that the overall model was significant.This was supported by an F statistic of 347.815 and p value of 0.000.The reported probability was less than the conventional probability of 0.05 (5%) significance level.The ANOVA results imply that the independent variables are good joint predictors of e-Government websites.The ANOVA results also indicate European Journal of Technology ISSN xxxx-xxxx (Paper) ISSN XXXX-XXX (Online) Vol.1, Issue No.1, pp 36 -55, 2016 www.ajpojournals.org