EVALUATING THE QUALITY OF UZBEKISTAN’S GOVERNMENT WEBSITES: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ACCESSIBILITY, PERFORMANCE, AND SECURITY

Uzbekistan has spent the past decade building a large e-government infrastructure, yet no comprehensive public evaluation of how well these websites actually perform has existed until now. This study evaluates 15 official Uzbek government websites, covering national portals, ministries, agencies, and regional platforms, using WAVE for accessibility, Google Lighthouse for performance, and SecurityHeaders.com and Qualys SSL Labs for security. The evaluation is motivated in part by the January 2026 OneID data exposure, which raised practical questions about whether these sites meet modern web standards. The results show an uneven picture rather than a simple verdict of good or bad. SSL/TLS encryption was strong across nearly every site, but HTTP security headers were inconsistent, with OneID and two regional sites among the weakest. Accessibility was generally solid, yet the Government Portal — the site with the most citizen traffic — recorded the lowest accessibility score in the sample, while Regional Government sites scored best on accessibility but worst on performance, suggesting a possible trade-off. The scientific novelty of this study lies in providing the first comprehensive, multi-dimensional evaluation of Uzbekistan’s e-government websites, filling a clear gap in the regional literature. Overall, the findings indicate that Uzbekistan’s government websites are not failing uniformly, but succeeding and failing inconsistently in ways that a single test alone would miss.