2025 Theses Master's

Governance Development and Accessibility Readiness of Municipal Home Pages and Municipal Service Portals in the United States

Alexander, Mateo

Despite how crucial municipal websites are to urban planning in omnichannel governance, there are shortcomings in effectively information dissemination, public participation, and successful service delivery in an attention economy despite rapid digitalization. Municipal websites may not be optimized to serve central roles in municipal service informational flows in a platform economy, leading to a further stratification of a gap between citizen needs and e-participation. Difficulties in service findability and usability for municipal residents might substantially affect at-risk urban populations.

With the time being 20 years past the E-Government Act of 2002, the study sought to examine the development and maturity of municipal websites and municipal service portals. With growing conversations in Congress and the legal system how the American Disability Act applies to websites, the study also sought to examine how municipal websites and municipal service portals are performing in digital accessibility. Municipal websites did not seem to be as developed and the lack of features such as sitemaps, search navigation tools on service portals, and lack of languages on some websites poses questions of website accessibility and maturity for populations such as people with low digital literacy or non-English speakers.

Despite high levels of ARIA features, municipal websites showed strong presences of accessibility alerts and errors, which poses problems for the differently abled who might physical or cognitive disabilities like the blind, the deaf, and those with low vision. Planners should advocate for digital e-inclusion, helping to create more inclusive digital governance, smart city, and platform urbanism models.