eInclusion@EU Topic and Issue including short description of the topic

Topic III: eAccessibility and eInclusion in relation to online services

The importance of inclusive online services is underlined both by the growing importance of online services of general interest (eHealth, eLearning, eGovernment, eCommerce) in everyday life and by evidence of significant disparities in society in relation to the personal capabilities needed to effectively use these services. There is the risk, therefore, that existing disadvantages may be exacerbated because of exclusion from the new possibilities offered by the online world. These issues are of central importance for people with disabilities and older people, who may be especially in need of access to such services, as well as for other groups who may experience difficulties or challenges in relation to service access (e.g. because of language barriers) or particular needs as regards content (e.g. ethnic minorities).

Case Outline

HELP - www.help.gv.at - is an initiative of the Austrian Federal Chancellery and has become one of the most important e-Government applications in Europe. HELP is an Internet platform and a virtual guide to a wide range of Austrian public authorities, offices and institutions. As a so-called one-stop shop it offers citizens bundled information about official procedures, deadlines and fees, as well as making forms available for download via a single access point.

A large number of services and information is available for more than 200 different themes, structured along so called "life situations", such as pregnancy, childbirth, marriage and so on. Thereby HELP constitutes an interface between authorities and citizens, with special emphasis on criteria such as a maximum of transparency, readily understandable (application) forms and, clarity of information.

Following these criteria and objectives, the start page of HELP offers a list of life situations on which the user can obtain general information on for example relevant interactions with authorities or particular details. The user can choose from several life situations in the areas of work, housing and habitation, disabilities, education, documents and identification, family and partnership, finance, leisure and mobility, living in Austria and social issues and emergencies. By choosing a situation the user gets a list with issues belonging to that particular life situation (e.g. life situation work - job-seeking, work schedule, further education, job application tips, holidays etc.). By further selecting one of these issues the user gets a list of sub issues, which leads him or her to the information in question: documents, legislation etc. Due to this structuring it is possible to find the required information easily and quickly. In addition to this, the page offers a term lexicon that explains the official language, offers a search function and the opportunity to ask questions or to comment.

Separate links to specific services for businessmen, women and foreign citizens are easily to find for the targeted people. HELP for Foreign Citizens for example describes official proceedings in English and facilitates the contact with authorities for those who are in Austria for short or long periods of time, either for business or private reasons. Translation into Hungarian, Czech and Slovakian are in preparation. Particular facilities for disabled persons, their relatives and nurses allowing them to prepare and conduct official transactions with the government are offered on the HELP website. In order to ensure equal access of disabled people, HELP complies with the WAI guidelines "A"-level for the whole website. HELP has put considerable efforts to reaching the level of conformity "AA" and subsequently "AAA". A working group in the Federal Chancellery with representatives from several organisations for disabled people and from the Federal Ministry for Social Security and Generations deals with this part of project development.

The initial situation in Austria (at the end of the 90th) was that all ministries provided citizens with (partial) information from their areas of responsibility on individual websites. HELP was developed to establish an efficient link between the Austrian administration and the public. The prototype of HELP had the aim to offer all citizens the opportunity to get administrative information easily via a single access point. HELP was launched by a small core team consisting of staff members from the IT Division of the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) and net-value (Marketingberatung und Projekt GmbH & Co KG), a consulting company, commissioned by the Federal Austrian government. HELP was finally launched in 1997. After completion of the prototype other project partners were invited to give their comments and co-operate in the project implementation phase. The core team and the development partners are now jointly responsible for the continuous further evolution of HELP. The results of this work are subsequently presented to the HELP Advisory Council in which all project partners (from the Federal Ministries, the Austrian Chambers, social insurance institutions, the Labour Market service, the Provinces and local communities, etc.) are represented.

The private net-value company involved in this project is on the one hand specialized in marketing consultancy and on the other hand in technical IT development and Project Corporation. Thereby net-value closes the gap between marketing and technical IT solutions. Thus net-value is an important partner for the person in charge on the governmental side. They designed a cost-effective form and developed a process that justices to the complex structure (federal level/ ministries, states, municipalities, social security etc.). The core team of HELP consists out of five people from the agency net-value who are involved in the editorial work and answering user requests, four people from the Federal Data Processing Centre who deal with the technical operation and two people from the Federal Chancellery, the lead ministry.

The extended working group consists of people dealing with HELP in various manners. One person in the Centre for Public Administration Research who works for Official Proceedings Online ("Amtsweg online"), around 50 HELP coordinators and specialists from the administration checking and approving contents and specific user requests, a further 100 members of the HELP Council and representatives of the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber and the Federation of Austrian Industry.

During the first few years following the introduction of HELP the main emphasis was on the provision of information to citizens in electronic form, today there is an increasing trend towards complete electronic processing of all administrative procedures. However, this development is currently in its early stages. For example the procedures for an application for a passport have already been modernised with the result that everybody can apply for a passport at any district administration or federal police headquarters in Austria.

The main trend of increased online service provision is also reflected in the way the implementation of HELP was promoted. Determination of a corporate identity and a word/picture brand stating that "the change from the paper clip to the @-sign" shows the focused main direction, that in future paper for official proceedings seems to be not needed anymore. With this very handy branding, today still the trademark of HELP, an advertising campaign was started in 1998 by the Federal Minister Molterer and Undersecretary Ruttensdorfer. The campaign "change from the paper clip to the @-sign" was shown on billboards, TV spots, folders and print advertisements. A public relationship campaign accompanied the efforts for increasing the awareness of HELP. The focus of the information campaign consisted of presenting and explaining a much demanded but complex and often misunderstood piece of information in a simple way demonstrating the clarity and simplicity of HELP. As already stated before, through considerable efforts in accessible design and in increasing usability of the services offered, HELP aims at ensuring that all citizens, independent their age, functional or mental capabilities or education, can benefit from these online services. In order to raise awareness in public administrations, events in Austrian municipalities, exhibitions, lectures and seminars were organised. This was an important measure to reach all institutions concerned and to ensure they were willing to support HELP.

These intensive efforts to implement HELP and designing it as accessible and usable as possible are reflected in a growing number of visitors of HELP. The website is increasingly used by citizens to prepare and transact official procedures. This is for example illustrated by the fact that the number of hits counted for the files on the Help server increased to about 10 million in 2005. Due to the continuous development of the section "HELP in new life situations" and the widening of the range of services e.g. Glossary from A-Z, the number of user accesses per month has increased considerable since the online service has been launched in 1997. The number of life situations has increased from 15 (1998) to nearly 200. Furthermore, new life situations are included into HELP on an ongoing basis. In order to ensure that everyone immediately finds what he is looking for, the relevant information is shown separately. The site "Formulare/Online-Amtswege" (forms site) is one of the most popular sites of Help. In October 2005 HELP visitors were looking for about 6500 proceedings provided by HELP.

Currently, HELP offers access to approximately 2800 forms in different formats (HTML/online, pdf und doc/rtf/xls). Visitors of Help can submit important questions and proposals to the forum "Fragen und Anregungen" (questions and comments) which registered about 9250 contributions in 2005. The service Glossary from "A-Z" explains more than 200 terms, phrases and expressions that are used by the authorities in a way that is easily understandable and close to the citizen. Users have the opportunity to forward terms that were not found to the editorial staff of HELP. This allows extending the Glossary from A-Z on an ongoing basis. Since 2001, the HELP portal has been further developed to allow online transactions. "Formulare/Online-Amtswege" (forms site) permits users to conduct official transactions through the Internet quickly, completely and wherever and whenever they want. In cooperation with currently more than 600 partner authorities, about 2,700 online procedures are now online available. Transactions such as dog registration (Hundeanmeldung) and application form for "Wahlkarte" (Antrag auf Ausstellung einer Wahlkarte - application for election documents) are among the most frequently conducted transactions through the link "Formulare/Online-Amtswege". These transactions were successfully completed about 2600 times via HELP.

Learning Points

The above mentioned increasing user numbers demonstrate the successful concept of the HELP portal.

However, not only the user numbers are steadily increasing; synchronously the HELP content was permanently extended and improved during the last years. This dynamic development and the approach of an expanding project seem to be an important success factor for the development of HELP. When developing an online portal where many institutions are involved or affected ongoing changes and developments have to be expected and taken into account. Thus, structures need to be implemented that are not simply able to react on these developments and changes, but instead they need to take them into account in a more comprehensive manner.

With the division into a responsible core team (responsible for the development of the principle HELP structures and the permanent updating and maintenance), an extended working group which regularly works on the general enhancement and enlargement of content and the HELP Advisory Council, structures were build up where responsibilities are allocated clearly and ongoing improvements are guaranteed. As a result of this and due to the integration of many other institutions in an early development phase the successful development of HELP was facilitated. In addition to this the ongoing communication and dialogue with the citizens enabled via HELP gives important input for further developments and improvements.

Further success factors for HELP seem to be for example the implementation and ongoing adherence of main principles such as (a) transparency, readily understandable forms and, clarity of information and (b) access for all by considering the WAI Guidelines from the very beginning on. These principles are the basis for a successful market implementation and to reach as much citizens as possible. In addition to this, the implementation of the comprehensive approach of net-value, which combines marketing and technical IT development, certainly had a positive influence on HELP.

The successful HELP platform has been awarded with numerous awards. It reached the second place in the Justitia Award 2005 (Category: "Best juristic homepage of public authorities, lobbies and education"), the e-Europe Award 2003 in the category "A better life for European citizens" and the e-Media Award 2003 for the best Austrian website in the category "information". HELP was selected as the best public-sector home page 2003 providing information on legal matters, was among the finalists of the Stockholm Challenge Award 2000 and has been selected as the second best public-sector home page providing information on legal matters and received the W:URL Award for the best Austrian web presentation.

Recently the HELP platform was awarded with the German BIENE-Award 2006. The BIENE Award ("Barrier free Internet opens new insights") is an initiative that rewards accessible German-speaking websites. Competing websites are evaluated by a jury and in a practical test conducted by disabled people following basic principles of for example eAccessibility, readability, navigation, structure.

The above mentioned numerous honours demonstrate that HELP is really outstanding in different fields. The awards vary from honours for juristic issues, information content, legal matters and accessibility.

Further Information

Publisher:
Bundeskanzleramt (Austrian Federal Chancellery)
Abteilung I/13 - E-Government - Programm- und Projektmanagement
Ballhausplatz 2
A-1010 Wien
Tel.: (01) 531 15-0
Fax: (01) 531 15-4172
E-Mail: info@help.gv.at

net-value GmbH & Co KG
Link to net-value: www.net-value.com/Content.Node/english/index.php

Technical Support:
Bundesrechenzentrum GmbH
Link to the Bundesrechenzentrum: www.brz.gv.at/Portal.Node/public?am=PCP&p.contentid=10007.9886