OK - here’s your starter for 10: Who carries out the accessibility assessments for the annual Better Connected reports into the state of local authority websites in the UK?
I’m not sure why, but there is a persistent and widespread belief that the answer to that question is “SiteMorse”, which is kind of frustrating, since, in fact, it’s always been RNIB.
In 1999, Julie Howell carried out brief assessments of the “Top 20″ sites. I joined RNIB in March 2000 to set up this consultancy, and did similar “Top 20″ assessments for the next couple of Better Connected reports. Then, as this team began to grow, we did assessments of the “Top 50″ sites for a couple of years. For the 2004 report, we developed a methodology which would make it possible for us to assess all (468!) local authority websites against the WAI Guidelines, to Single-A standard. We used the same methodology for the 2005 report, then for last year’s 2006 report, we took the assessments up to Double-A standard. And that’s what we’re doing again for the 2007 report, which is due for publication in February/March.
This is a major undertaking for us each year, with automated assessments of all 468 sites (200 page sample of each) at WAI Single-A and Double-A standard, manual assessments at Single-A of all sites which pass the automated Single-A assessment (this year that’s over 350!), and then further manual assessment to Double-A of those sites which pass the initial automated and manual assessments. And it’s kind of frustrating to have everyone think it’s someone else doing the work!
So now you know - RNIB does the accessibility assessments for Socitm’s Better Connected reports. And yes, I know that means that if you’re a local authority web manager and disagree with the accessibility assessment of your site in the Better Connected report, it’s us you’ll be grumbling at now. That’s fine - we’re the ones who do the assessments, and we make ourselves available on the Socitm Insight forum each year to answer any questions there might be regarding those assessments.
Julie Howell | 01/02/2007 at 15:18 | Permalink
I can confirm that it was indeed me in 1999, during my time at RNIB. Better Connected is an excellent report largely because SOCITM insists on high quality assessments using real people (as opposed to automated software alone).
Gary Hides | 06/02/2007 at 11:22 | Permalink
I know this is totlly off topic, but, I tend to get lots of RSS notifications of the SPAM that you get in your comments. Have you ever looked into http://akismet.com/ ? I think it may help you with your SPAM problem.
Dan Champion | 06/02/2007 at 15:56 | Permalink
Wow, 350 local government websites to check manually. Which circle of hell is that?
Thinking of you all in your time of need.
PS: You can skip ours, nothing’s changed for a year. :-)
Bim | 13/02/2007 at 18:14 | Permalink
Reply to Gary,
Apologies for the spam, we do use Akismet spam filter on here, but it’s IP address changes occasionally, which unhooks our server from it. This happened for the first time last year, and we thought it a one-off, but when it happened again, we’ve realised that this is something that will happen periodically, so we’re now geared up to react more quickly next time.