Usability and Accessibility of Air Force Intranet Web Sites

The Air Force is moving to a network centric environment where information must be visible, accessible, and understandable. This transformation has seen the adoption of the Internet web browser as a de facto standard for information access. The Technology Acceptance Model suggests that information systems must not only be useful but also be usable and a large body of usability engineering knowledge exists to support usable design. In addition, the U. S. government mandates specific minimum design features required to support disabled user access. This research effort seeks to establish an understanding of how well common practice usability design principles and government mandated accessibility guidelines are followed by Air Force intranet web sites. Heuristic evaluation is used to investigate web site usability. Accessibility is inspected against government guidelines. The results of this study suggest that Air Force intranet web sites do not adequately comply with many usability principles and that accessibility compliance varies from site to site. Furthermore, although the majority of usability and accessibility design principles are not captured in military guidance, scores were higher for those principles that are captured in the guidance than for those that are not.