蜜芽传媒

Socitm sock it to 鈥榚m

• By Paul Crichton
• 29 Mar 07, 08:55 AM

The Society of IT Management () released their annual report on Local Authority websites earlier this month and it has created quite a furore.

The report, 鈥樷�� has proved to be contentious. Accessibility assessment was carried out on their behalf by the , who found that of the 468 local authority websites, only 71 met basic accessibility standards.

Local authorities strongly disagree with these results. The , a special interest group for the public sector, felt compelled to write an , describing the report as, 鈥渋n places so factually and paradigimatically flawed as to render the entire report worthless.鈥� The RNIB felt it necessary to provide a detailed , and accessibility experts have been having their say about it in various forums like .

The debate is too complicated to cover in detail here. But the main objection concerns the suitability of at least some of the accessibility guidelines that are the basis for the measurement of accessibility.

The coding of a web page must be error free to meet one particular accessibility guideline requirement. For instance, you need to end paragraphs with a 'close paragraph tag' but if you forget, the page might look OK, but fail this test. Times change, and 'bold' tags should now be 'strong' tags. It can look the same, it doesn't make a page inaccessible but one present on a page written years ago would still be seen as a fail. The issue is determining the severity of the error, not just identifying an error - something logistically impossible in testing 468 websites, even for the superhuman RNIB Web Access team.

My own experience tells me that the local authority websites I鈥檝e come across tend to offer better website accessibility than most. And reports of this nature can have a demoralising effect upon those responsible for implementing accessibility standards. Worse, the mindset can turn to not meeting accessibility requirements of users, but to meeting requirements to do well in these reports 鈥� and they are not always mutually compatible goals.

Public sector institutions should be pretty used to league tables and performance targets as they have been introduced into all walks of life, from NHS waiting lists to primary school children鈥檚 reading abilities, and the reality is that they are unlikely to go away. Perhaps it will be necessary for Socitm to work with the local authorities to set benchmarks that everyone is happy with.

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