• The DTI is spending £60,000 on building templates for a website launched under a year ago at a cost of £200,000.
• The £60,000 is part of the money to be spent ensuring that the DTI website meets the standards the department specified in the original requirements for their site, despite the suppliers of that site being made fully aware of those requirements and failing to deliver them.
• The DTI is employing Fujitsu, the very same company that received the lion’s share of the £200,000 spent on the original site, to meet the standards they were contracted to deliver in the first place.
• The £60,000 covers only one half of the first step in a three-step process.

Leave your comments on his site, where you can read the full story.

“The Government is committed to ensuring that all government websites are accessible and easy to use for people with disabilities.

Action 7 of the Prime Minister’s Digital Strategy is to ‘improve accessibility to technology for the digitally excluded and ease of use for the disabled’.

This strategy is to be implemented by DTI with support from OGC and eGU (now the Cabinet Office Delivery and Transformation Group). A cross-government review of the Digital Strategy is currently under way under the supervision of the DTI).”

Joined-up government? My arse.

I received a response yesterday. Here’s an excerpt (there’s lots of background information that we already know):

We discussed the issues you raised with officials from the Department. In their view, the main cause of the accessibility problems involves the Content Management System. Although the project experienced technical difficulties, the Department did not, in our view, effectively manage its relationship with contractors who were involved in developing the website, and as a result the Department did not achieve its objectives for a website meeting recognised accessibility standards. The DTI recognises that its management of this project was not satisfactory.

The Department has commissioned the work needed to rectify the accessibility problems, and acknowledges that further expenditure is likely to be required to make its website compliant with government guidelines.

There is evidence that the Department is taking steps to learn from the problems experienced with this project. As outlined above, the Department commissioned a review of the accessibility of the website from Nomensa, which identified the main issues to be resolved and suggested a number of solutions that would enhance web accessibility and can be applied more widely in managing procurement projects.

I am not able to comment on the Department’s decision not to provide an answer to you under Freedom of Information legislation on the grounds of cost. If you wish, you are entitled to raise this matter with the Information Commissioner, whose website is www.ico.gov.uk.

So: lessons have been learned, an as-yet unspecified amount of dosh has been pissed down the toilet, but hopefully the public might get the website it should have had in the first place – and a group of unaccountable civil servants might just do their procurement and project management better. Maybe.

I’m not holding my breath.

The project to launch a consistantly branded, usable website and implement a Content management System took place over a three year period. The requirement for the new website to comply with Level AA of the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines did appear in the original Invitation to Tender. It is regrettable that at the end of a long and complex phase of delivery of the project, this element was lost.

The Department does recognise the importance of ensuring our web content is accessible to all. We acknowledge that there are some accessibility issues with the new website. An accessibility audit of the site has been commisioned, to identify where the site fails to comply with relevant standards. The recommendations will be used to ensure, subject to cost and available resources, the site meets Level A of the W3C’s WCAG as laid down in the guidlines for UK Government Websites as soon as practicable and Level AA in the longer term.

Despite the acknowledged accessibilty issues, we can confirm the new website is being used on a daily basis by a member of the DTI staff who uses the Supernova speech and magnification system (V6.5). This assistive technology does allow users with visual impairments to navigate the website and access the content of the pages. This demonstrates the new DTI website does not ‘lock-out’ all users with disabilities.

It’s a standard letter, identical to the one Jim Barter received from his MP.

I suppose it’s a result in one sense: the offending site will be audited, and made good (hopefully by someone who knows what they’re doing, which at least rules out the last supplier). So that’s a victory for accessibility.

But it’s something of a pyrrhic victory. The site will be significantly less accessible than if it had been designed that way from the beginning, as the original (ignored) spec required.

It’ll also be significantly more expensive, as the DTI are spending taxpayer’s money on this audit and elastoplast exercise. A private company would learn its lesson from the financial burden this places on them. The DTI don’t give a toss (ignore their absurd posturing about the cost of our Freedom Of Information requests) so it’s entirely plausible that they’ll commission rubbish and mis-manage their suppliers again in the future.

A blind staffer can use it – so it must be accessible!

There’s an interesting statement in the letter from the DTI:

The new website is being used on a daily basis by a member of the DTI staff who uses the Supernova speech and magnification system.

This is a false argument, of course; a staffer who knows the site very well is hardly a representative of the vast majority of visitors. The fact that we’re talking about people with disabilities doesn’t change that; disabled people are people and are not defined by their disability; they are not all the same.

It shows that the DTI top-brass regard their duty as merely “allowing” access; they haven’t thought about the accessibility of the site for a blind member of the public just surfing in for the first time, who doesn’t want to practice daily in order to accomplish their business with the DTI.

A similar argument to this is rumbling through the courts in the USA. Compare this with the NFB/ Target lawsuit. Target have found three screenreader users who say “we can use it, so it’s not inaccessible”, although Jim Thatcher’s declaration to the court suggests to me that it’s hardly doing its best to assist screenreader users who aren’t as proficient as Target’s stooges:

For example, because of missing alt-text on image map areas on the home page, more than 80 percent of the characters found by screen readers were gibberish, like “Ref equal sc underscore iw underscore l underscore 1 601 minus 9748238 minus 9274539? Percent 5 Fencoding equals UTF8 ampersand amp; node=3112881″. All these characters coming from href values of areas without alt-text are not only meaningless but agonizing to listen to. In addition, the numbers are spoken in full by a screen reader, like “nine million seven hundred and forty eight thousand two hundred and thirty eight.” (Source)

The DTI has the same attitude as Target. And it stinks that my government is as unaccommodating as a big yankee corporation.

But I’m tired of the fight now; the long hot summer has worn me out.

Why are you complaining? You’re not blind.

A guy called Charlie left a semi-hostile comment, saying

Have you received any comments or support from people who find the site difficult to use because it’s so inaccessible? … It seems as if the people who really get their nickers in a twist about this are not the people who use screen readers or who are visually impaired … So I just wondered if you’d had any contact from those that you, your co-conspiritor and many others, proport [sic] to be representing and fighting on behalf of?

A good point; no – I’ve had no emails from blind people who are aggrieved at being locked out of websites. This doesn’t mean that I have no right to complain, for a couple of reasons: the first is that I helped pay for this website, and it isn’t a good site. The second is that I help pay the salaries of the people at the DTI who took their eyes off the ball during procurement and supplier monitoring; as a concerned citizen, I have a right to complain about tax pounds being pissed away through ineptitude.

Then there’s the misconception that accessibility is only about the blind and only about screenreader users.

And finally, there’s the suggestion that blind people don’t complain because they don’t care, or they don’t use the Web. They do complain: I’m working with an organisation that are redesigning in consultation with some complainants, but generally they’re not listened to – or they’re heard, and then ignored, like the Target case or by people like Chris Beasley on the grounds that it makes economic sense to discriminate.

The questions were asked twenty days ago under the Freedom of Information Act. On the last possible day the law allows for them to delay before responding, they have answered our questions.

Thank you for your request for information on the accessibility of the Department of Trade and Industry’s website which we received on 26/06/06. I regret that we cannot provide this information, as the cost of administering your request would exceed the limit prescribed under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act. This is £600, which represents the estimated cost of spending 24 hours in determining whether the Department holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information. Where the cost of compliance with a request would exceed the appropriate limit, we are not obliged to comply with that request. We have received nine separate FOI requests regarding the accessibility of the DTI website. All nine requests appear to have been generated by contributors to the blether.com website and discussion forum:

• http://www.blether.com/archives/2006/06/the_dti_respond.php
• http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/index.php/2006/stupid-government-websites/

Regulation 5(1) of the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 provides that, where two or more requests for the same or similar information are made to a public authority by different persons who appear to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign, those requests may be aggregated for the purposes of estimating whether compliance with the requests would exceed the appropriate limit.

We have aggregated the nine requests received on this subject, and estimate that the cost of compliance with them would exceed the appropriate limit. We are therefore not obliged to provide the information requested.

However, the DTI is aware of the accessibility issues with the new website. An accessibility audit is planned and the recommendations from the audit will identify accessibility improvements.

So that’s OK then. I wonder which of the bright sparks on their project team will do an accessibility audit – and how much that’ll cost?

What’s particularly galling is the misuse of the Freedom of Information Act to keep the answers from us. They’ve aggregated all the information requests and, combined, they cost too much to fulfill. The logic of this is that the greater the demand for such information, the more it allegedly costs to provide and hence it won’t be supplied. Crazy.

It’s breathtaking that they are currently playing the rôle of defenders of the public purse, after they’ve squandered a quarter of a million quid on a crap site. (Note that they are “not obliged” to fulfill our request, so are not forbidden to give us answers; they’re witholding the information by choice. What could they possibly be hiding?)

What a farce. What a disgrace.

Dan and I will appeal, and if you sent an information request in, we urge you to appeal as well. If you want to help, please write to your MP and demand the DTI answer our questions.

Our unhappiness is due to their wasting public money on a site that does not meet the level of accessibility required in their own spec, and the fact that the DTI have said that “if further changes are to be made to the website the cost will be met by DTI”, so presumably, Fresh01 (the suppliers) will not be required to put their mistakes right at their own expense (if indeed, the DTI’s answers show that it’s the supplier’s fault).

We want to know why this shoddy procurement, development and supplier monitoring happened, and what will be done to prevent it reoccurring. Therefore, we’ve sent further questions to the DTI as a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

The questions

1. Did the DTI take legal advice on what level of WCAG conformance constituted compliance with the DDA? If yes, please provide a copy of the advice received.
2. If no legal advice was taken, what was the rationale behind specifiying WCAG level AA conformance in the original specification?
3. Please provide a full copy of the document referred to in the response to my previous enquiry – ‘Invitation to Tender for rebuild of the website, brief for customer research, design & information architecture, and usability testing phases’.
4. Tendering: was the decision to award the contracts made on price alone? Please provide copies of all DTI reports/investigations during the tendering phase of all shortlisted suppliers’ ability to deliver an accessible website conforming to WCAG level AA. Please list the qualifications and experience of commissioning accessible websites of those who picked the successful suppliers.
5. What provisions existed in the contract for a contractor failing to adequately satisfy the deliverables specified in the requirements document?
6. How did the DTI monitor deliverables against the specified requirement of WCAG level AA, and the validity of the code? How regularly were these checked during the project? What processes were followed by the DTI to assess the completed website against the deliverables in the requirements document?
7. At which point in the project did the DTI drop the requirement for AA conformance? Please provide documentation on why this decision was taken, and whether legal advice was taken.
8. The Usability Company (now Foviance) claim to have been employed as the accessibility and usability agency for the redevelopment of the DTI website (www.theusabilitycompany.com/news/newsletter/dti.html [Link co-incidentally broken; Google cache]). What was this company’s precise role in the project, what was the value of the work they carried out, was this included in the costs of £175,000 quoted in the response to my original enquiry, and why was the company not mentioned in the response to my original enquiry?
9. Are Fresh01, Fujitsu, The Usability Company (Foviance) or Percussion still on any list of the DTI’s preferrred suppliers?
10. Has the DTI amended its processes for procuring web design work since Fresh01 were commissioned? Is there an organisational requirement to use PAS78 as the basis for any future commissioning work?
11. What action is being taken to address the deficiencies of the new DTI website? Who will bear the financial burden of this remedial work, and what is the estimated value of the work?

When the reponse comes in, we’ll publish it here, along with any reply from Fresh01, who are cordially invited to respond.