The Government and Usability
- Question: Why is usability important with respect to
government services?
Usability is important irrespective of (whether) people use
government services. I think it is very important particularly
when you think about the audience the government has, which is
everyone in the UK and every business in the UK. There is a wide
range of businesses and a wide range of people and therefore you
have to try to make government information and transactions
available in a very usable way to all sorts of different people,
at different levels of skills with different levels of knowledge
and different abilities. Therefore, it is of particular importance
for us, compared to say an organisation just selling to a
particular narrow group of people. They can define their audience
much more precisely and target usability just at them, so it is
crucial and essential to what we do.
Accessibility
- Question: You spoke about accessibility during your speech
and how important it is for government websites. Some while
ago there was a report, which claimed that 75% of Government
websites were not accessible. Are the government websites
aware they are not accessible and also what are they planning
to do about it in the next couple of years to make themselves
more accessible?
There are a number of government websites that are used
extremely heavily, e.g. the Number 10 website is obviously used a
lot, particularly by journalists, the Inland Revenue site, the
National Health Service, and NHS Direct site all dominate
government internet access. They're all very good sites and they
get awards for accessibility. There are a few sites that should be
more accessible and aren't and we'll try to focus on those...
Sites should be aware of their accessibility. We recommend that
people do test their sites for accessibility and we suggested how
they might do that in our latest document that was introduced in
July, which is about accessibility on government websites, (and
is) recommended to webmasters on how they should check whether
their sites are usable or not and we expect them to follow the
recommendations. **
- Question: Who should be setting the accessibility standards?
I think the people who know a lot about accessibility are the
experts. That's what the conference today was about.
Any large organisation would be daft not to listen to an
accessibility expert when they are devising their websites so that
they can appeal to their customers. I'd appeal to anyone that's
building a website to make sure they get good advise about
accessibility issues exactly the same way as they would get
technical advise on IT issues to do with the design. Secondly, the
government has a particular responsibility in dealing with issues
such as social inclusionto firstly set it's own house in order by
making sure that its information provisions are accessible to
people. Hopefully that example will also help other people decide
that that's what they want to do as well.
If you are suggesting we go further than that and legislate for
the standards of all websites. It is a totally impractical thing
to do as, a lot of the websites people look at in the UK are based
outside the UK, and my only inclination I would have to say is,
that the government should set an example by doing it for
themselves. Where it can make a difference in propagating
international standards of accessibility we should try to do that
but we can't make people who are putting information on the web do
things they don't necessarily want to do. Mainly because it is
unenforceable and secondly, if it is a commercial organisation
that is trying to sell something, their markets will tell them if
it is accessible or not and as a result will simply fail.
Funding for government websites
- Question: Many local government site managers claim that
they do not have enough budget to make their sites usable and
accessible. How can these government sites make their sites
accessible?
I think web access offers a real opportunity for Local
Authorities, just as it does for Central Government, to improve
the delivery of their services to their voters. I think it is also
an opportunity for them to make sure (that) they can make
themselves efficient organisations. In some respect the web can
help them minimise their costs.
So I personally feel that a local council just like central
government needs to think really hard about the real benefits they
will receive if they tackle web access properly, both in terms of
providing a better service to people and also providing a cheaper
service to people. They should allocate their resources
accordingly.
There are times when it would make no sense to pile a lot of
money into a particular service when actually it can be more
effectively and more efficiently done through a call centre or
through face-to-face contact. There is a range of areas where that
is not the case and where web access reduces the work loads of
hard-pressed staff in local call centres or staff dealing with
people face to face, subsequently relieving them and resulting in
money well spent. The individual councils have to decide what is
important for them at a local level.
You will see over the next year or so, firstly the number of
sites diminishing as we try to weed out sites that don't need to
be there. Secondly, the sites that are here will become much more
usable and better focused on their customers and their audience
and will be accessible to everyone that needs to have access to
them.
Reflections on the role of e-Envoy
- Question: You have held the position of e-Envoy for three
years now. Now that you are coming to the end of your term as
the e-Envoy, what legacy would you like to leave behind?
There is a large amount of people involved here not just in my
office. I shall look back with some pride, not just on my behalf
but also on behalf of all the other people who have been working
with us. The fact that we have made a huge amount of progress on
allowing physical access to the internet, we have gone from no UK
Online Centres to 8,000 net. Every library has Internet access.
99% of schools now have internet access. On the physical access
side, we have done an enormous job.
Secondly we have done a tremendous job in helping people use
the internet. Internet access by the majority of the population is
now a given. Most people now regularly use the internet and it is
now entered into the language people use. We have done quite a lot
compared to other countries and are working hard to make the UK a
leading nation.
One of the big issues around the time I arrived was 'Broadband'
and an awful lot has been done not just by the government but also
by particular telecommunications companies, particularly British
Telecom and their new Chief Executive, Ben Verwaayen. Ben came
into the job 20 months ago saying he was going to make Broadband
something he lived or died by. He said if he jumped off a cliff
shouting Broadband, his only hope was that the rest of the company
followed him. I think we are part of the influence that made them
emphasise that so much and I'm very proud of that.
I think we also made huge strides on the government side. We
really got the debate going on how we get people to use government
websites, three years ago we didn't have people talking about how
we use these things and now we do. We now recognise that it is
just as important to make them usable as it is to make them
available, and that is important around the customer focus area
and in particular it is about making the sites themselves look
good, be usable by anybody that should be using them, be readable
and understandable by them and be easily followed and easily
found, and I think we have made massive strides. There's still
along way to go but we wouldn't be having the similar debates were
having now, two years ago and I'm very pleased about it.
** You will find a copy of the quality framework document at
the Office of the e-Envoy
website. Please scroll down on the page
for the document titled Quality Framework for UK government
website design.
Return to
newsletter |
