JBVoices
Breezing the shoot. Random mutterings of a Web Developer. » Hypocrisy and the Accessible MP

What started out as an attempt to contact my local Member of Parliament (MP) via his web site has expanded somewhat. You can read all about it in my Open letter to Richard Benyon MP but to summarise, having seen the parlous state of his site from an accessibility point of view, I felt it only fair to check out the local competition which, with a couple of exceptions was no better and in one case much worse. Much much worse.

That site has fallen pray to the all too familiar “how hard can it be” to build a web site scenario. A copy of Microsoft Frontpage and the ability to press a few buttons and Voila! I can understand where this MP is coming from, he’s trying to save his constituents money by not employing a professional web designer, at least I hope it wasn’t a professional web designer, but in the process he’s discriminating against a fair number of those constituents.

For anyone reading this who doesn’t understand what it’s all about, to paraphrase the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) - any web site that offers goods, services or information to the public, whether paid for or not, must be accessible to all regardless of ability or technology. This means, you and I, anyone who is blind or partially sighted, anyone with mobility problems who can’t use a mouse, anyone with hearing problems, anyone with reading difficulties, colour blindness and so on.

It’s not asking for miracles, there are some things that just can’t be made accessible so it requires you to provide an alternative that is. It requests that the site should comply with the minimum level of the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines, Priority 1 often shown as Level A. This also applies to Government sites, and in my opinion Government should be leading the way, especially as they are the ones who made the law.

I could go on and on about why it’s good for your site ranking to do this, why it doesn’t affect your bottom line if it’s taken into account at development time, why it will increase your customer base, why the site doesn’t have to look boring….. you can find all of this for yourself on a hunt round the web but maybe you’ll get the gist from some results. When Tesco supermarkets made their online shopping service more accessible, it resulted in revenue of more than £13m per annum. That revenue wasn’t available to them whilst the site was inaccessible to blind shoppers.

My original post prompted a response form Paul Crichton who works for Net-Progress and did a small survey of MP web sites a couple of years ago to support an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons regarding web site accessibility. He suggested I might like to follow it up and as it was relevant to what I was doing anyway, I dived in.

Now in his report, a number of MPs are quoted as agreeing that MPs weren’t doing enough, that it was the right thing to do and that they’d get right on to it. It seems that some two and a half years later, most are still getting right onto it.

The following items are quotes taken from Paul’s report, coupled with my review of the current state of the relevant web sites. I should say here that this is not an in depth review. I have mainly checked the home page of the site on the basis that it’s the page people arrive at and if they can’t use it then they’ll get no further. It should be noted that there has been an election since the report and not everyone here was successful, however, for the most part, the sites are still kept up to date so they are obviously intending to have another go.

First I want to address the Liberal Democrats. Two MPs in the Net Progress report fall into this camp,

“Web-sites are a fantastic way of providing news and views to our constituents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is a missed opportunity for us if we do not make them as accessible as possible.”Tom Brake MP

“Owners of web sites must make sure that they specify that content must always be accessible to people with a visual impairment. Legibility is far more important than gimmicks if you want people to keep on coming back after that first visit.
I regard my web sites as an important means of communicating with my electorate, and I cannot afford to make it inaccessible to people with impaired vision.”Sue Doughty MP

It’s clear that the Lib Dems have taken accessibility on board. I’ve visited a number of their sites, both for this check and on previous occasions whilst researching for something else entirely. They have attempted to have all MPs and candidates use a standard site which, when it was built, obviously complied with the regulations. They all carry the Valid XHTML, Valid CSS and WAI A badges however, I haven’t found one yet where the home page actually meets those claims, it would appear that whoever is updating the sites doesn’t understand any of the requirements and just plugs in content without checking it.

Now for the rest:

Further, it could be argued that 55% of MPs have not taken “reasonable steps” as required by the Disability Discrimination Act 1999. Indeed, Peter Bottomley MP concedes “many of us need to try harder”

I got all excited about Peter Bottomley’s site, it certainly looks the perfect candidate for an accessible site, it’s clean, easy to read, text resizes. The code doesn’t validate but it complies with WAI Priority 1 and but for a couple of silly mistakes would be higher. It’s keyboard accessible and, I’m not sure why, provides a text only alternative that doesn’t perform any better or worse than the main site which seems a bit of a waste of effort but at least there’s awareness and action.

It also provides a link to his “other site” which is on epolitix.com. This site is a collection of MP “sites” which are basically sub sites. The code doesn’t validate but it complies with WAI Priority 1 and also provides Browsealoud for those who wish to listen to the site.

Not a bad effort all round.

Lynne Jones was one such MP, who said, “having been made aware of the issues, we’re now taking positive actions to improve accessibility”.

A quick look at Lynne Jones’s site makes me wonder what positive actions those might be. The code is invalid and the page fails the minimum requirements. The navigation is accomplished by graphics with no link text so anyone with a reader trying to move round the site is told they can go to page “graphic 19″.

“As technology forges ahead, we have to make sure that the less fortunate in our community do not lose out.
We need a serious study of how best to offer website accessibility for visually impaired people”.
Doug Henderson MP

Doug appears on sites all over the place but having gone through several I finally found a link to what appears to be his official site on epolitix.com. The same comments apply as for Peter Bottomley’s epolitix site above.

“MPs sites are a public service and I take the view that the House authorities should help to educate Members about technologies that are beneficial to disabled people and provide them for Members’ use.”Andrew Miller MP

Now I may be reading that completely wrong but that comment appears to be saying that it’s the House responsibility and not his. The certainly reflects in his site, another example of “Do it yourself” with FrontPage, in this case version 2.0. It’s served up in a frameset so is fairly useless to anyone browsing without frames. I would have stopped there but if you’re using anything but Internet Explorer it gets worse. The layout is broken and the missing images mean you have to guess what page you’re going to end up on. The code doesn’t validate, it doesn’t comply with WAI Priority 1. It is however keyboard navigable even if you don’t know where you’ll end up.

“At the very least, websites should have variable text size and the ability to permit electronic audio reading of the text. The internet should not be barred from use by those with visual impairment; it should be open to everyone.”Michael Fabricant MP

On the face of it, this didn’t look too bad. It’s plain, easy to read, I could do without the italics but you can resize and it’s keyboard navigable. The code is invalid and it fails the minimum levels so I looked a bit deeper and anyone using a screen reader will be met by myriads of tables cells with nothing in them. I really don’t get this site at all, it’s such a simple layout I can’t for the life of me figure out why all the cells?

It’s clear that the majority of MPs just don’t get it. It’s all very well spouting platitudes about the importance of web sites being accessible but you have to do something about it. I wish I had the time to spend checking all the sites. I’m sure there are some MPs out there who’ve had a really good stab at it like Peter Bottomley and hats off to them whoever they are but the rest, it’s an appallingly bad show.

Comments like “it’s the House’s responsibility” just don’t wash. In the business community, site owners are ultimately responsible when somebody can’t use their site. It’s not their developer who gets the nasty letter. Site commissioners need to be aware, or be made aware, of just what their responsibilities are. And whilst the rule makers are rule breakers the “unwashed masses” are unlikely to behave.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Access 4 All. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.

Bookmarking Links » del.icio.us | Digg | Furl | Reddit | BlinkList | Ma.gnolia | StumbleUpon | Technorati | Help |

These posts may be related:

Living on the edge looking in »

Open Letter to Richard Benyon MP »

Modern Web Design »