MikePadgett.com

Accessibility row over Better Connected 2007

— A "pass or fail" culture dominates the latest quantitative study on public sector web accessibility.”

A very public row broke out recently over a report concerning the results of a survey published by Socitm entitled Better Connected 2007, which surveyed the level of accessibility of 544 local authority websites.

The brouhaha centred upon the methods employed by Socitm to generate metrics amounting to a thumbs up or down.

The ink on the publication had barely dried when the influential PSF weighed in conspicuously with vocal criticism of “continued peddling of what can at best called ill-informed pontificating and at worst out and out drivel.”

Better Connected is one such example, and the Insight team behind it add insult to injury by clipping town halls for £395 a pop as they vacuum up cash like the most opportunistic of privateers while cowering behind and milking their quasi-official .gov.uk status for every penny they can. [1]

The methodology consisted of a programme of automated testing, followed by human testing conducted by the RNIB, an organisation which has been seen to take a leading role in the promotion of accessibility best practice in recent years.

Acrimony surrounds the report’s implication that sites that did not meet the W3C‘s WCAG were deemed to have “failed”, contributing to a generally gloomy bigger picture in which the site of only one local authority was rated ‘excellent’, 64 others reached Level A Conformance (compared to 62 in 2006) and the rest presumably trailed even basic standards.

The overwhelming issue highlighted by PSF and others [2] is that reliance upon WCAG, automated testing and narrow criteria does not make for an accurate assessment of accessibility, generating instead sensational headlines and more spin based on a “dodgy methodology which fails (and therefore implies inacesssibility of) perfectly good websites … This is doing more harm than good” [3].

Are false impressions being created? Certainly a great deal of energy has been spent mooting just that, but away from the glowering flames, there’s also the year-on-year grinding negativity of Better Connected to worry about.

The RNIB‘s Donna Smillie suggests that there’s something inherently wrong about seeing accessibility as a boolean [4], yet there can be little doubt that many do make that mistake.

Though the context of Smillie’s statements is intended to support Better Connected, doesn’t the report – and the study as a whole – encourage a pass/fail view of things, attempting as it does to generalise into a digestible format what is a wide-ranging and often laborious area of practice treated in varied meticulous ways by hundreds of different organisations?

This is after all a quantitative study, not a qualitative one.