ENSIAS–ÉTS WCAG Audits — Diagnosing Accessibility Gaps Across Morocco's E-Government Portals

Morocco's e-government portals serve millions of citizens for tax, identity and permit services, but no dedicated national accessibility monitoring programme exists yet for people with disabilities.
Two independent, decade-apart university studies quantified the gap. In 2014, Bousarhane and Daoudi (Electronic Journal of e-Government) applied the AccessiWeb method to 4–7 pages on three government websites and found that none met the minimum WCAG accessibility level across the A, AA or AAA criteria. In 2024, a team from ENSIAS (Mohammed V University, Rabat) and the École de Technologie Supérieure (Montréal) ran a systematic AChecker audit against all 61 WCAG 2.0 success criteria on five of the country's most-visited government portals — referred to as Portals A–E for confidentiality — evaluated on 3 December 2023.
The 2024 audit found every portal still failing between 4 and 8 success criteria, with total logged errors ranging from 41 (Portal B) to 123 (Portal E) per homepage. Perceptibility problems — missing alt text, poor contrast, non-resizable text — and operability gaps such as unclear link purposes and missing headings were the most common failure categories, while robustness (code parsing) was the strongest principle across all five portals.
This is a diagnostic and recommendation exercise rather than a deployed fix: both studies produced portal-specific remediation lists, but the authors report no institutionalised, recurring monitoring cycle, and measured conformance had not visibly improved between the 2014 and 2024 snapshots.

Read the full analysis: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3852/paper13.pdf