However, the only problem I can think of is users of IE6 becoming frustrated when they can’t resize a site where the text is sized in pixels and blaming the council – not very likely, but worth some thought.

Beyond that specific point, all we are really seeing here is that if you ask a lot of individuals what is important to them you’ll get a lot of different answers. That’s surely the whole point of using a range of users to test a range of scenarios as both Better Connected and Webcredible seem to have done.

I don’t think the user priorities are right. What’s on (kids/pools etc) i think would rank right up top. As you say, no methodology for how they decided this.

Most usability issues can be addressed by actually talking to customers. That’s why I have ‘cheaper usability methods’ in my ’10 pt plan).

xp

“So Council sites which provide text resizing controls will score better than ones which don’t. However, a Council which educates their users how to adjust their own browser text size settings is actually of more benefit to the users — because this will enable them to change their text size on any site they come across, rather than just on that particular council site.”

In fact, I downloaded the report, spotted that bit you quoted and promptly dismissed the whole thing – I was so disgusted.

I like your comments about finding councillors too, I think you are really spot on there. People dont live in wards – they live in houses, which are in roads.

This is the kind of thing LAs really struggle to get right, they simply cannot bend their cmss to do anything like this.

I am working on a small council focussed cms, and made my mind up to only return to this report as part of a feature checklist, just about its only use.

The Better Connected report it is derived from is just a grey soup of common practices, never thinking out of the box, and usually missing the big sea changes going on around us on the real web.

I continue to question the value of regurgitating and showing us the mirror the results of technical and buying decisions that were made, what, two years ago?

Let me give you two examples:

This is the first year that BC has mentioned RSS ! I started using it on an LA site at the end of 2002!

Lets analyse that. A significant new technology arrives which allows the sharing of data between organisations websites, and allows users to subscribe to the news they wish to follow. Did that only scream joined up government to me then? Was I on my own? Apparently not. This year there are loads of LA sites with RSS feeds of their own. How did these disparate organisations come to this decision?

Not by reading Better Connected – that was for sure.

Up until LAST years report, points were deducted for NOT having a “text only version” of their website, then mysteriously they are deducted points for having one!

By my reckoning that makes about 8 years of telling 450 IT departments that they should ideally do something that anyone with an iota of accessibility knowledge knows is just plain morally wrong, expensive, error prone and stupid.

Wrongness, uncertainty, doubt and bad steers emanate from these reports – the flaws are built in, because the nature of the beast is the internet. I have to read for at least an hour a day just to keep up with the changes in my particular corner of the web!

Blingy text-size changers are the “text-only version”s of tomorrow. Loved by designers, loved by Councillors because the designers told them it made the site “more usable”.

They will be discredited because of the reasons you point out and, mainly, they subvert the w3c standards.

Period.