Accessibility of EU Governments' Web Sites Report

The UK Cabinet Office published its eAccessibility of public sector services in the European Union report last Thursday, 24th November. Amongst fascinating detail is one statistic that stands out:

3% of the 436 online public service websites assessed achieve Level A conformance with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) passing the full suite of both automated and manual checks.

That's 13 web sites out of 436 tested that conform with the WCAG priority 1 checks. Not bad for those 13 sites - their contributors should be applauded. There's nothing really suprising about the remaining 97% but nevertheless the statistics have impact if only for their specificity. The report also includes recognition of the link between accessibility and usability (i.e. ease of use for everyone, not just disabled people). The implications for access to information for everyone in the EU, regardless of disability, are implicit.

The report used the WCAG and the ATAG as standards for the checks made.

Table of Results from Checks Carried Out on 436 EU Web Sites:

(Numbers calculated by the author)

In the conclusion of the report it goes on to make 21 recommendations that will be presented EU-wide as part of the UK's Chairmanship of the EU. One of them is:

Set a clear target for making all public sector websites in the EU conform with WCAG 1.0 Level Double-A by 2010...

However, putting aside the recent release of the, WCAG 2.0 Working Draft on the 23rd November, the target is reasonable and not as hard to achieve as some might think. In fact, in the summary, the report also states that:

Many sites continue to omit alternative text for images. Where provided, it was often found to be inappropriate or ineffective. Where frames were used, they often appeared without titles or equivalent alternatives. By addressing these issues alone, the total number of sites achieving a Limited Pass at Level A could increase to 30%.

That would mean 130 web sites out of the 436 tested could achieve a decent standard of accessibility with some simple changes. That would represent a significant improvement to public sector web sites. So the short-term goals are for some sites to make some immediate and fairly straightforward changes to achieve some semblance of conformance quickly. For the medium term the summary provides that, 'it is crucial to equip content developers and authors with tools that support accessibility and to train them in how to provide content that is accessible.

For me, this is crucial. I have experienced the implementation of software in local authorities, and the huge variety of ability and experience in the users of the tools, so I know how dificult it can be to try and implement user-dependant standards around information recording. Replacing user-dependance with tools that facilitate accessible content publication would achieve much towards final conformance. Procurement and training are crucial. Tools that are being used or are to be procured must conform with the ATAG. That would allow the tools themselves to facilitate accessible content publication and remove some of the burden on users having to remember standards of input to produce accessible material.

On-going monitoring is also crucial. The study brought together automated and manual testing and although nothing new in the private sector it is a significant advance towards real accessibility if continued as a monitoring standard. I agree with the report where it says, 'Harmonisation of monitoring across the EU would make comparison much easier'. If such a harmonisation could occur within a positive feedback loop with the stakeholders, designers, developers and authors of web site content then huge strides can be taken to improve access rapidly.

Semantic Web design ethics are not mentioned in the report quite rightly as it is outside the aims of the document. However, even though WCAG Double-A conformance will deliver more meaningful content by default, a dose of SIDE would not go amiss in optimising the discovery and usability of the web sites for end users.

The value of the report cannot be understated in evidencing what we already knew from experience. Something else it highlights is the overwhelming effectiveness of web sites in delivering information to users with disablilities. The introduction to the report provides a chart that describes the accessibility of different channels of communication. Unfortunately it's tabular data expressed as a image and therefore unaccessible by default. I've re-worked the chart as a html table here:

Motivation by incentive seems to be the order of the day from the report. Exactly what incentives are not defined but as the report makes clear, penalties for non-conformance are widely different across the EU, if they exist at all. A suggestion is the use of badges or labels stating a certain level of accessibility conformance for a web site. The current abuse of these badges, in particular the prevalance of sites and designers wrongly claiming, 'WAI-AAA' conformance for status reasons is worrying. However, this should not necessarily effect some kind of certification based on quality conformance checking in the future for all public service web sites.

So now governments have the evidence to action, a set of recommendations that are reasonable and achievable, and the means to implement them. What now? Will the report get lost in the mist of EU policy-making or in 2010 will double-A conformance be achieved? At the very least, the evidencing of the problems is a huge step forward and the recommendations for solutions even more so.

The final step is implementation of policies based in part on this report. It's not just up to the politicians though, it's also up to us as designers and developers to keep on improving our accessibility skills and work in partnership with everyone to help our respective governments along the way.

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