Enhancing Accessibility to E-Government Processes

Many governmental institutions provide their customers with access to documents by electronic means. It is worthwhile to look at both the chances and the risks which this process implies for disabled citizens. Due to legal constraints governmental authorities are particularly responsible to consider the needs of handicapped persons. Our contribution follows the observation that governmental processes mostly are based on forms. We distinguish several processing scenarios, with the use of paper as means of transport on the one end and complete electronic treatment at the other end. This article focuses on approaches that provide access to governmental processes for people with visual impairments. Additionally, we aim to enable electronic government processes in developing countries where citizens have limited experience in handling IT-based processes. We describe an approach to associate synthesized speech to scanned images of printed documents, thus yielding an audio-visual document representation.