ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

After attending the PSF Event ‘The Future of Local Authority Websites and How They Are Measured’ I had some degree of confidence that SOCITM were listening to what the audience had to say, and that the Better Connected report in subsequent years would improve.

This was in now small measure due to Richard Steel’s attitude, who seemed willing to take criticism on the chin and to be prepared to listen. However, only a couple of weeks later, my initial enthusiasm about this is draining away rapidly…

Dan Champion made the point that simply listing “the top 20 websites” failed to take into account that without saying specifically what they were doing well, there was a chance that someone might perceive all of the site to be of good quality and end up copying something that was in fact poor practice.

What Dan instead suggested was to “Introduce a “best of” for categories like use of GIS, use of A to Z, use of search etc, with detailed explanations of any recommendations.”

Unfortunately, it appears SOCITM have missed the point, responding:

So we will retain the Top 20 because out of 468 local authority websites we believe it is useful to identify a group that people can look at as good examples of the genre.Martin Greenwood

Yes, but unless we know why a site is seen as good, there’s always the chance that the particular bit someone is looking at is actually one of the poorer sections of the site.

As we discovered that a site can be scored by as little as one reviewer, so there is no guarantee of any consistency across the sites, Dan’s call to drop the scoring system entirely seemed even more justified, along with his eminently sensible suggestion that rather than just stating something is best practice, the report should explain why this is so.

Again, the sheer pointlessness of an inconsistent and indefensible scoring mechanism is defended:

Scoring different aspects of websites is just a way of revealing what the team considers to be good practice. It would not be practical to use description for everything that we score.Martin Greenwood

Yes Martin, but the problem is that different members of the team may consider different things to be good practice. If one considers concise A to Z lists to be good, and one considers comprehensive A to Z lists to be good, two sites could score differently depending on who they are reviewed by. And that can’t be good.

Of course, Martin tells us that:

This point about single reviews of websites misses the more important point that in 30% sites (135 to be precise) three reviewers assessed the site for ther 2008 report…There is little point in several reviewers looking at sites which are clearly transactional or clearly not. Martin Greenwood

Except the Better Connected report doesn’t actually know whether sites are transactional or not. All it knows is whether a site offers a form to fill in to do something. As the reviewers never even get as far as pressing the submit button, a Local Authority site which returned a page not found error every single time the user pressed submit would be seen as ‘Transactional’ by Better Connected.

So if you want to improve your standing in Better Connected, concentrate on having lots of forms, irrespective of whether or not any of them work.

Transactional? Farcical.

Next, Dan made a point about “truancy”, pointing out that Better Connected scored sites according to whether or not they had a site entry for truancy, and suggesting that “According to our survey only 20% of councils regard truancy as sufficiently important to include in their website’s A to Z list of services.”.

Truancy may have only been recorded specifically as “truancy” in 20% of sites, but Dan points out the IPSV and LGSL recommended terms are “Attendance and truancy” or “School - Truancy” or “Schools - Truancy”.

Aside from the fact that if any of the sites had any one of these, most users would have found it if the site’s search facility was half decent, this demonstrates that SOCITM wanted the sites to use a non-preferred term.

Now I think that they have some justification for this: people will look up ‘truancy’ so it is of benefit to have it recorded.

Our practice is not to use IPSV or any other ‘official’ list, but rather words used ‘in the street’. ‘Truancy’ is a good term because it is, well, what people say.Martin Greenwood

I hate to break it to you Martin, but I agree with you. However, if SOCITM think the ‘official’ lists aren’t as good as they should be, then SOCITM ought to be clamouring for the official list to be changed — if they are actually trying to help local authorities, instead of just providing another arbitrary set of standards for them to be expected to conform to.

So while I might agree with that point, to me this highlights a failure of SOCITM to be batting for its members…

Dan suggested that in-depth case studies of best practice might be beneficial. SOCITM gave a qualified assent, but stopped far short of suggesting this might make its way into Better Connected’s standard report:

We have done this in the past … and can do so again. However, this would have to be a separately funded project that the Socitm Insight board would need to agree to against other priorities.Martin Greenwood

Why would it need to be separately funded? It would be of most benefit if it was something included as part of Better Connected, rather than something else.

Then there was a rather masterful piece of evasion to Dan’s suggestion:

Stop asking the RNIB to spend a lifetime testing sites against WCAG 1.0. Use their expertise to identify the primary barriers to accessibility on local authority sites and to put together educational guides for each. By all means test those barriers the following year.Dan Champion

It’s fairly straightforward: rather than relying on WCAG 1.0, let’s focus against the primary barriers to accessibility experienced by real users, and get the RNIB to report on that. Makes sense?

Particularly when at the event, I pointed out the complete stupidity of using WCAG 1.0, which rates a failure to correctly mark up a quotation (and is of no significant accessibility detriment to anyone) as being equal to not providing appropriately associated form labels (which can render forms unusable to those with screen readers). And this was backed up by a screen reader user at the event…

Forms are much more part of the web now than they were in 1999 when the guidelines were written: a site with unusable forms is less accessible than one which doesn’t mark up changes in language — but WCAG 1.0 thinks otherwise.

But of course what SOCITM themselves actually think is quite difficult to tell from Martin’s answer…

We have explored all these issues in our recent supplement on accessibility in which we did identify seven guidelines for good practice. We also suggested some areas for improvement in the way we report and present results of accessibility testing, and are looking at other ways of improving this aspect of the report.Martin Greenwood

Right. So you’ve talked about something and then looked at something and you believe something could be done to improve this aspect of the report. Well, it’s a good job you were so explicit about what you’re looking at doing, isn’t it? Otherwise I might have been liable to suspect we were being fobbed off with flannel…

I had thought SOCITM were going to listen. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether they will only listen to what they wanted to hear in the first place. I was going to refer to it as head/sand/Ostrich scenario but I think Peter Barton put it best:

A great treatise on how not to treat clients by ‘Pachys Derma Socitimou’. There are none so blind as those that will not see – in this case your clients ire at your intransigence. It just makes me shake my head in wonder.Peter Barton

I’d still like to be here this time next year, telling everyone what great leaps forward have been made with the Better Connected report, but I’m now a lot less confident, given that Martin’s unwillingness to actually take on board any of the points raised has apparently the backing of the SOCITM board.

Frankly, I think unless SOCITM demonstrate that they are willing to make changes, the time has come for someone else to stand up and offer a better critique of Local Authority websites than Better Connected seems willing to offer.

Even Better Connected, anyone?

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 12:13 am and is filed under Accessibility, Public Sector, Standards. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.