Many thanks for the post and the comments. I would like to just pick up on two points.

First, I don’t think Scott is strictly correct when he says there is no DDA requirement for accessibility in Australia. The DDA (1992) clearly states, “It is unlawful for a person who, whether for payment or not, provides goods or services, or makes facilities available, to discriminate against another person on the ground of the other person’s disability“. And through the efforts of the Australian Human Rights Commission (formally HREOC) it is equally clear that the Act applies to a whole range of situations including employment, education, transport and the use of internet technologies. However, I do agree that it would be beneficial to have something with a little more muscle, and incorporating the need for web content and authoring tool accessibility into the whole area of Government procurement is probably worth serious consideration. Something similar to Section 508 in the US.

Second, I think there is a general misunderstanding about the notion of “Accessibility Supported” within WCAG 2.0. I believe the WCAG 2.0 technological neutrality approach is a good one and should be adopted by the regulators in Australia. We should be concerned with making sure materials are accessible rather than the technology used. As already mentioned, PDF is a format that can be accessible and in some circumstances maybe the most appropriate format to use – so I believe we should require developers to make their PDFs accessible, rather than following the ten year old WCAG 1.0 model which in effect said we don’t care what you do with your PDFs because you must provide a HTML alternative. In this regard, I do not believe the New Zealand model is a good one to follow, since it provides little or no incentive for developers to improve the way they use non-W3C formats such as PDF and JavaScript.

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article “Adopting WCAG 2.0” which looks at the approach taken by different countries. Some readers might find this interesting also the comments include links to specific information.

The post wasn’t censored — it was posted online before all the details were finalised, and then taken down so we could update it. You can see the updated post now at http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/09/10/the-vox-pop-2-0-learning-journey/

Regards,

Taskforce Secretariat

The following appears as a post in my GReader, but is not visible on this site?
Is there a reason it has been removed or ‘censored’, as it’s one which I’d like to share with a colleague. Allison

The Vox Pop 2.0 Learning Journey
from Government 2.0 Taskforce by Nicholas Gruen

We’ve just finished a couple of weeks of full on touring the country. There’s more to come, but we’ve visited Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. I’m in the States this week and then we’ll get onto some regional visits. I think there’s a bit of a buzz about. Of course what really matters is if we live up to it, but so far so good. My last visit comprised a great couple of sessions in Adelaide with some great discussion – for instance on whether or not identity and authentication was a Web 1.0 or a Web 2.0 issue. Taskforce member Glenn Archer and I didn’t agree to start with, but I think we managed to work it out as we discussed it. And is ‘joined up government’ even possible? And what role can Web 2.0 play in helping to join up government.

We took recordings of those sessions we could and we’re hoisting them up here. Now within government this raises some ticklish questions. Since we haven’t recorded all the sessions, some people could complain that they’ve got the rough end of the pineapple (either by virtue of being recorded or not, depending on their perspective). More importantly it would be best to be able to post the recordings with transcripts, particularly for those who need these to properly access the material (for instance for hearing impaired people). But we have the recording now. So since we have plans to get a transcript into existence should we wait till the transcript is available before we release the MP3s. That seems silly to us. So we’re releasing the MP3s when we can.

And in fact that can help us generate the transcripts.

* Perhaps you are willing to help transcribe them into text in a range of languages to improve their accessibility for domestic and international purposes, or have another suggestion in this area?
* Perhaps you can suggest an audio format that would produce smaller files (still with clear audio)?
* Perhaps you can suggest an innovative way of analysing these sizeable chunks of information to uncover some common threads or new insights?
* Perhaps you have had previous difficulties accessing government information online and know of helpful tools and technologies we can use for this and other such transcription tasks.

If you have an idea to suggest, then post it as a comment below or email it to contact@gov2.net.au by the end of next week – 5PM Friday 18 September. Please don’t send us any commercial proposals though – this is strictly an experiment in crowdsourcing and collaboration (and another chapter in our attempt to learn by doing, something it seems to me governments need to get more comfortable doing if we’re ever going to get Government 2.0 living up to its potential).

And if we can’t crowdsource or collaborate to find a solution, we have a backup plan.

Taskforce Roadshow audio files

After reading through the posts, I just wanted to add a few thoughts both from the perspective of my role at MAA and as a person with a disability.

Firstly, it’s important to ackowledge that unfortunatley there is no mandate, nor DDA requirement for accessibility in Australia, unlike the US, the EU and many other countries around the world. Yes, there is some good policies at both state and Federal level, but there is nothing that requires these policies to be enforced, and the DDA doesn’t specifically discuss the IT needs of people with disabilities. As a result, if the government choses to do nothing on the online accessibility front, they are not in breach of anything and hence inacessible government information continues to go online.

Should an additional legislative framework on IT access be established, perhaps through the DDA, I believe it would make a profound difference as government information would actually be required to produce its information online, and when the government issues tenders for projects – such as the recent ‘Broadband for Seniors’ initiative – it would specific accessibility in the tender process and ensured that accessibility was built-in, not built-on as an earlier post mentioned. It would also be good given the upcoming NBN rollout and the services which will be delivered along hte 100Mb/s pipeline.

Secondly, I agree 100% with the need to provide support to developers with access, and if there are any developers out there who would like help with the implenetation of ATAG and WCAG, I’d be happy to help and I’ve put a variety of resources specifically for developers on the MAA website, http://www.mediaaccess.org.au in the ‘New Media’ section.

Thirdly, while on the topic of WCAG, it would be good if the Australian government could start the transition towards WCAG 2.0. A few arguments in favour of the move would include the fact that it focuses more on the abilit for people to achieve what they need from a website rather than technical compliance of 10 year old echnologies, it’s been around for nine monehts now and the fact that major accessibility legal cases, such as the recent HSBC accessibility settlement, are based on WCAG 2.0. What do others think?

Also, just to enter the PDF accessibility discussion: the accessibility of a PDF varies greatly depending on how a PDF is created. Yes, Google can convert PDFs to HTML if the PDF is created in a particular way, but it’s an uphill batle if the PDF is of a scanned document, which is now government generally convert paper copies of things to go online. As others have mentioned, perhaps the time has come for government submissions to all be done online in an accesible file format?

Finally, MAA has recently laucnhed an initiative to support people who are interested in web accessibility to have a voice in addressing accessibiit issues on government websites. It is called AWARe – the Australian Web Access Review, http://www.aware.org.au. Each month we put five websites up for review, and visitors to the site can answer some simple questions based on WCAG 2.0. The more people that do it, the more accurate the results and this provides clear information as to where the accessibility issues of government websites are, and provides us with an opportunity to work with government to fix them. There’s also a discussion forum which has just been set up, and it would be great if you oculd all participate in this initiative and share your thoughts on it. New sites are put up for review every month.

Thank you,

Dr Scott Hollier
Project Manager, New Media
Media Access Australia

I have run a google cached Fed Gov page and a Google Document Fed Gov document through an accessibility checker and these formats are most definitely not accessible and therefore not usable.

Cheers,

Rae

@Dave:

.pdf to .html conversion tools, while not perfect, are adequate and have been around for many years.

@Craig:

Google automatically converts PDFs and docs to HTML versions for viewing online. Output isn’t pretty – but it works.

I was hoping to pick up on the ‘good enough’ issue surrounding these approaches. Even the whole-of-government Agency Search service converts PDF/DOC to plain vanilla text for public consumption as these documents are indexed (not as they’re uploaded).

By this reasoning, is the simplest solution to ‘do nothing’ about making accessible versions of these files – because external search engines (and their HTML versions of binary documents) are already doing it for us?

While this may be acceptable to certain audiences, has anyone attempted to throw these automatically-converted, simplified forms of often complex documents against a stringent accessibility test suite?

(These are genuine questions, and I’m making no attempt to be antagonistic).

Buy or develop and deploy a whole-of-government document conversion technology which allows embedding of the output into specific government sites and you’ve suddenly lowered the agency-level overhead for meeting this specific accessibility requirement.

Alternatively, provide effective online submission systems such that organisations need never submit documents in formats which cannot be easily provided in accessible ways.

The largest issue I have encountered around accessibility is the low level of knowledge across government on what accessibility means and how to deliver it.

This isn’t simply amongst web teams (technical, design or content), but is at management levels – the people who allocate budgets and decide on the priorities.

These managers need to understand their legal obligations around accessibility and be provided with both a stick (an effective watchdog) and a carrot (accessibility awards and recognition – both personally and financially for their agency).

If agencies redevelop all their websites to achieve a given (not low) bar of accessibility, grant them extra dollars as a reward for saving the Government money in terms of potential legal defense fees and media management.

Why not a rating system for accessibility in Australian websites – similar to the rating for electrical appliances?

(2) For short and simple documents, there is no reason why html is not the default authoring format.

(3) AGIMO’s fairly complex document management system was designed to be accessible from the start (along with compliance to all appropriate regulations, not just accessibility). It was whitebranded, opensourced, and has been available to all agencies at no cost for a few years. For selecting and presenting from a large volume of documents, this should be the default unless a different product demonstrates clear value over the AGIMO tool.

(4) Ever since the release of WCAG 1, there have been enterprise-strength tools to scan entire sites for inaccessible html. There is little reason why volume licensing arrangements couldn’t make these tools available to all agencies for a reasonable cost.

(5) Any delay in making available accessible content usually indicates that “visual spin” has won over substance. Besides, generating eye-candy is more costly than generating straightforward documents.

(6) There is a similar issue with providing information to people with poor bandwidth – who are expected to waste time (and money) bringing overly glitzy webpages over the wire – or especially for those (often the poorest) relying on mobile phones, which if they can connect to the web, usually can only deal with html, not the other formats.

(7) In the case of submissions being made accessible, it shouldn’t be too difficult as all are eyeballed anyway. Conversion to html should only add another few seconds to the task.

(8) Where timeliness of publication is critical, perfect rendering is not absolutely necessary, (the standard of live captioning for news broadcasts on television is probably at the lower end of acceptable). A simple caveat that the text might be revised and republished is probably all that is required.

(9) And total agreement with all who have expressed thing along the lines of “it’s the law, stupid”.

The result of meeting the mandate was that access to substantial, valuable content was eliminated … is this acceptable?

Absolutely NOT. Accessibility means EVERYBODY has access.. not just those with additional needs.. something not being published (either at all or in a timely fashion) means that potentially NOBODY has access, and that it simply isn’t good enough. If those 300 documents had been published, then there was at least a chance for somebody who couldn’t access them *easily* being able to ask somebody to access and convert them on their behalf. Or somebody who thought it was important enough could have summarised the key points and republished a summary in a more accessible format… But now they aren’t available at all, nobody wins.

Online timeframes are shorter and users are impatient. Sometimes this may mean that access for many will be available before access for all. Is this acceptable?

Damn straight its acceptable, for many of the same reasons.. while time and/or money shouldn’t be used as an excuse to never do anything about accessibility in a government department, using the additional costs as an excuse not to do something AT ALL is far worse..

This is a classic case of working to the lowest common denominator, and given that the only “fair” way was apparently access for nobody, then that is a pretty low point indeed!

Mandate for inclusion in developer tools, enforce inclusion in the goverment procurement process, and even (although i don’t think it will help) give somebody a big stick to wield.. but do not let this issue slow down the openness that this taskforce seems like it might just have a chance of delivering..

There are many things that can adversely affect accessibility, and they all need to be addressed if we really are serious about accessibility and want good outcomes.

Here’s a list for starters:

* Decision makers or influencers need education/awareness raising so they are aware when they may make decisions than can affect accessibility
* Procurement policy (software and services) needs to address accessibility
* Selection of development, design, collaboration, authoring tools (mentioned in part by @Liddy Nevile) need to consider accessibility
* Systems, software and web development, customisation and integration needs to cover accessibility
* Selection process and job descriptions need to cover accessibility for any role that touches the design/content production process
* Staff training for all those who can impact on accessibility (not just the web folk)

As others have mentioned, if there is more effort up front, the costs are lower and we get better results.