UNDP–IPS review of all 63 Vietnamese provincial e-service portals' accessibility

In 2023, Viet Nam's Institute for Policy Studies and Media Development (IPS) and the UNDP Viet Nam office, supported by Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through the Citizen-Powered Innovation Initiative, ran the first independent review of the accessibility and user-friendliness of all 63 provincial e-service portals (PESPs) — the online gateways citizens use for administrative procedures in every one of Vietnam's provinces.
Portals were tested by both general users and users representing ethnic-minority and disability communities. The review found that none of the 63 portals met all six basic accessibility criteria used in the assessment for people with visual impairments, and that 62 of the 63 portals offered no voice-search function; 36 portals had no on-page search tool at all, and the search tools on 25 portals failed when users typed a misspelled keyword — a common barrier for ethnic-minority users writing in a non-native script. The 2022 national PAPI governance survey found barely over 1% of citizens had used e-portals to process an administrative procedure, underscoring the stakes of these usability gaps.
IPS and UNDP said the findings were being used to inform training for public-sector staff who manage the portals, and UNDP has since published a 2024 follow-up review of the same 63 portals from a user-centric perspective, indicating the diagnostic has become a recurring instrument rather than a one-off study.

Read the full analysis: https://ips.org.vn/en/library/first-review-of-accessibility-and-userfriendliness-of-63-provincial-eservice-portals-in-2023-ct270.html