Socitm to probe accessibility of council websites
Kable
Published: 05 Feb 2008 15:04 GMT
The local-government IT association is to carry out a special study on the accessibility of council websites.
Socitm has said that its insight team will produce a special supplement on the subject as part of its annual Better Connected report on local-authority websites, due to be published in early March.
Website accessibility has been a feature of the report ever since it was first published in 1998, but the organisation said there is a need to explore the subject in greater detail. While awareness of the importance of the issue has grown, so have differences of opinion among about how accessibility should be measured, and there is confusion about how webmasters can best make their sites accessible.
Socitm has invited the Public Sector Web Management Group (PSWMG), formed last year, to take part in developing the content.
Last year's report noted that the number of council sites achieving level A of WCAG1.0 — the web-accessibility guideline published by the World Wide Web Consortium — had not increased over the previous three years. This comes three years after local authorities in England were told they were expected to achieve this as part of the Priority Service Outcomes initiative.
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Additionally, in October 2007, the Central Office of Information (COI) reminded every public-sector organisation that failure to achieve level AA by the end of 2008 might, in extreme cases, lead to withdrawal of the gov.uk domain.
"Even level A of this global standard is a difficult one to achieve and maintain for large complex websites of the sort that local authorities need to provide," said report author Martin Greenwood. "Websites that fail level A include those that have made no effort at all on accessibility (and may not even acknowledge it as an issue) and those that have made a very considerable effort. Controversy around the issue has tended to create more heat than light, which is dispiriting to web teams and an obstacle to getting senior-management support for investment in accessibility."
"It may also have misled people about local-authority performance in this area, which is generally better than the private sector and other parts of the public sector," Greenwood added.
The supplement to the report will group websites according to the number and type of errors identified in testing them to the level A standard. This is intended to differentiate those that fail marginally from those that are very inaccessible.
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