Speaking at the Seventh International Conference on Human Services Information Technology Applications, Deputy Government Chief Information Officer (Operations), Stephen Mak Hung-sung, said the Government had spent more than US$360 million in the past five years on various initiatives to bridge the digital divide. Mak said that the digital inclusion programmes were part of the Digital 21 Strategy, with a wide range of initiatives aimed at elevating Hong Kong's overall ICT capabilities.
The e-government programme will complement digital inclusiveness and help develop the ICT infrastructure and security framework in the territory, said a government spokesman in a statement.
Mak said the government was concerned about the frustration faced by certain disadvantaged groups who were unable to use the web effectively due to various constraints. For example, vision-impaired people may have difficulties in seeing graphics and images while people with hearing problems may miss out content of an audio clip.
To ensure online public services are accessible to all, the Government revamped all its websites to comply with internationally recognised web accessibility guidelines by 2002.
Moreover, government websites maintain a consistent design by following a set of internal 'common look and feel' guidelines to make navigation easy. Simplified Chinese versions of webpages are also provided in addition to English and Traditional Chinese.
To enhance access of web information by the elderly and vision impaired users, a pilot Sound Portal was launched this year. Employing the latest text-to-speech technology, the portal 'reads' out the content of the websites in Cantonese, Putonghua or English.
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 01.09.2004
