Abstract
Illiterate and semi-literate people usually face different types of difficulties when they use the Internet, such as reading and recognising text. This research aims to develop and examine the influence of adopting a text-free user interface on the usability of a web-based government system with illiterate and semi-literate people. A number of steps have been followed in order to achieve this research goal. An extensive literature review has been carried out to explore the adoption of different concepts or representations of content to help illiterate/semi-literate people in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) projects. Then a consolidated framework is proposed and adopted in order to develop a text-free user interface. This can help in building a text-free user interface for a certain service here in Saudi Arabia. Cultural factors, education level, text-free icons, and usability guidelines have been considered in the above-mentioned framework. A prototype of a web-based government system after taking into account the above framework has been designed and developed. Usability testing and heuristic evaluation have been used as usability assessment methods in order to evaluate the system usability and its impact on the usability for illiterate people in Saudi Arabia. The results are encouraging as the achieved results of usability measures imply that adopting the consolidated framework has influenced the usability in this research.