Accessibility The Politics Of Design

"4. The Department was careful to limit the degree and

scope of conclusions drawn from the data provided by agencies, for the

simple reason that many of the components appeared to misunderstand some of

the questions. Spot-checks conducted by the Department of the Web sites --

the URL's of which were reported on the survey forms -- revealed that many

of them did not contain the features the components identified them as

containing. For instance, 592 Web pages were identified as containing

"applets." The Department, after reviewing a majority of these

pages, did not find a single applet in a spot-check of most of

them."

"There are many possible explanations for this observation.

It is possible that as components identified accessibility problems with

certain types of features (e.g., applets), they deleted the offending

features from their Web pages rather than making them accessible. It is more

likely, however, that many of those who evaluated Web pages were not

sufficiently careful or knowledgeable to correctly identify features of

their Web pages."

The Portable Document Format (PDF) has provided one of the most

controversial

accessibility problems of the decade. PDF documents, by the nature of the

medium, are portable, cross-platform, generally tamper-proof, and render in

exacting detail, representations of the original print document's fonts,

formatting,

etc.

"17. Recently, in a presentation to federal agency

officials and employees, representatives from Adobe explained that their

newly released version of Adobe Acrobat included many accessibility features

that, if used correctly, could be used to create files that were easily

accessible to users with disabilities. Adobe's Accessibility Seminar, Feb.

2, 2000, IRS Building. Word processed documents that are "printed"

to pdf instead of "scanned" to pdf are much more likely to work

well with Adobe's access utility. Adobe clarified that it sees

its job as simply to provide the tools for making accessible files, not to

teach users how to use these tools to make files more accessible."

(My Emphasis)

target="_blank">Information Technology and People with Disabilities:

1. only 5 percent of government websites show some form of security
   policy and 7 percent have a privacy policy
2. 15 percent of government websites offer some form of disability
   access, such as TTY (Text Telephone) or TDD (Telephone Device for the Deaf)
   or are approved by disability organizations.
3. 4 percent offer foreign language translation features on their
   websites
4. 22 percent of government websites offer at least one online
   service
5. a few of the sites are starting to offer commercial advertising,
   which raises problematic issues for the public sector
6. 91 percent of the sites responded to a sample email requesting the
   official office hours of the particular agency and three-quarters did so
   within one business day
7. states vary enormously in their overall ranking based on our
   analysis. Texas, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois ranked
   highly, while Rhode Island, Delaware, New Hampshire, South Dakota, and
   Nevada did poorly
8. the best predictor of state rank was population size. Small states
   had access to fewer resources and had difficulty achieving economies of
   scale necessary for technology initiatives
9. in terms of federal agencies, top-rated websites included those by
   the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Department of Treasury, Department
   of Agriculture, Department of Education, and Federal Communication
   Commission. Poorly ranked agency websites included the National Security
   Council, U.S. Trade Representative, White House, U.S. Postal Service, and
   Thomas (the joint congressional website)
10. in general, federal government websites did a better job of
    offering information and services to citizens than did state government
    websites
11. judicial websites ranked more poorly on providing contact
    information than did executive or legislative sites
12. there is a need for more consistent and standard designs across
    government websites.

Assessing E-Government:
The Internet, Democracy, and Service Delivery

The Developer's Dilemma