Evaluation of the availability of websites of communes in the Lubelskie Province

The article discusses the results of the research on the accessibility of 190 official websites of commune offices in the Lubelskie Province. For this purpose, an experiment was developed which consisted of two stages: the first one in which three automatic tools were used, and the second one for the needs of which a checklist containing eight criteria was developed and used. In this manner, two indicators were obtained specifying the percentage level of website availability. Afterwards the conditions specifying when the website of the commune office will be considered as meeting accessibility requirements were adopted. It was established that fulfilling the requirements would take place after the website obtained the result no lower than 80% in the automatic survey and no lower than 50% in the expert analysis. After conducting the research, on the basis of the collected results, the general level of accessibility of websites of communes from the Lubelskie Province was specified. For the automatic analysis, it was 74.92% and for the expert analysis – 45.99% and in both cases it was lower than the assumed thresholds. Only 33 communes reached or exceeded both of the established accessibility thresholds.