I knew it was a good omen when, the night before last Thursday’s conference, a guy in the hotel lift asked me if I’m The Great Duckano.
The day’s events went very well indeed; our presentations gelled well together, and good questions were asked.
Continue reading Public Sector Forums accessibility talk
Dan Champion and I remain unhappy with the Department of Trade and Industry’s answers to why they spent a quarter of a million pounds on a Clarkian failed redesign.
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.
Continue reading Fresh01’s redesign: more questions for the DTI
Dan Champion has an excellent post with information accessed under the Freedom of Information Act about the brand-new oh-so-1997 website of the Department of Trade and Industry, built by Fresh 01 and Fujitsu for a cost of £200,000, yet fails to meet a reasonable level of accessibility, even though it is clearly required in the specification (specification - PDF, 120K, specification - .doc, 89K).
I saw an advert in a magazine for a company offering “web-doctors” to diagnose bad websites - ironically called sickwebsite.co.uk, which redirects to some firm called byteart. A quick glance at their site shows that they promise a “free review of .. accessibility and legal compliance” as well as “Search engine visibility”. Given that a good Google rank is intimately related to accessibility, I thought I’d check on their accessibility for five minutes.
Continue reading Snakeoil salesmen: sickwebsite.co.uk
SiteMorse sent out “league tables” to lots of local government webmasters, ranking their web sites for accessibility, download speed, metadata etc.
The developers were then put under pressure to change their sites to get higher “MorseMarks” even though automated accessibility tests don’t work and SiteMorse had very odd criteria in their closed-source secretive testing suite. Many felt that they had to make their sites *less* accessible in order to please their bosses by being higher in the league tables.
Things started to get nasty when SiteMorse issued a press release criticising the Guild of Accessible Web Designers’ web site and then changed the press release when Gawds cried foul.
Isofarro, Malarkey and the WaSP ATF blogged it.
The Public Service Forums website (”created for use by e-Government practitioners in central and local government to encourage the sharing of knowledge and good practice”) has decided to stop publishing SiteMorse’s league tables, thus depriving the snakeoil salesmen of the oxygen of publicity.
Yay.
An out-pouring of anger about their Accessibility validator leads to the WaSP ATF stinging SiteMorse. Let’s hope we hear something positive soon …