E-GOVERNMENT
Accessibility survey slams e-gov websites
11-12-2006
by Emmet Ryan
A new report has blasted government efforts to make its websites accessible to disabled users.
The study, by internet consultancy firm Red Cardinal, found a quarter of government departments' websites failed the minimum, or priority one, standards required by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
"These are globally recognised standards," said Richard Hearne of Red Cardinal. "Most websites reach the priority one standards set down but in the 2005 Disability Act the Government committed to reaching priority two." The survey found that most sites had not reached this standard.
Four government departments did comply with both the WCAG priority one guidelines and HTML/CSS cosing standards: the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, the Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment, the Department of Finance and the Department of Social & Family Affairs set the standard amongst government departments.
The survey studied a total of 41 websites covering government departments, public bodies and political parties.
Political party sites fared particularly poorly with 57 percent failing the minimum standard for accessibility. "Most of the websites studied in the survey are accessible but several have coding errors," said Hearne. "There is a greater likelihood that websites with coding errors will have problems with screen reading technology, which blind people use when accessing websites."
Hearne said coding errors could not be used as a precise gauge of accessibility but that they can provide a rough idea of the scale of the problem within certain websites. The websites for the Department of Defence, the Examinations results service and the Farmer IT Training service were amongst the websites with the most coding errors.
"It's not difficult to bring these websites up to the priority two standards. The guidelines have been set down, all the webmasters need to do is follow them to make the websites more accessible," said Hearne.
He said there were signs that work was being done to raise the level of accessibility of government websites. "A positive feature of this report was the number of government websites that aspired for a higher standard than the current basic standard," said Hearne. "This is very encouraging and forms the foundation of the new inclusive web."
The report also analysed the use of RSS newsfeeds on the 41 websites surveyed. The study found that 43 percent of political party websites use RSS, with 25 percent of government departments and 11 percent of public bodies using the service. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a method to syndicate site content by creating a document that summarises specific site content such as news, blog posts or comments and forum threads.
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