Local authority website league table 'should be scrapped' » Central Government » 24dash.com

Local authority web managers have today called for an official annual league table of their sites' accessibility to be scrapped or drastically reworked, after branding the latest findings "misleading and fundamentally flawed".

Council web teams have strongly criticised the results of this year's 'Better Connected' web survey by the Society of IT Managers, which concludes that local government website accessibility is "not improving" and claims to expose a "gap between accessibility claims and reality".

The 2007 report, published this week and billed as a comprehensive snapshot of the state of council websites, appears to show that only two out of 468 sites met the accessibility level required by government standards.

However the research has been discovered to contain a number of significant flaws in its testing methods which 'fail' highly-accessible websites, throwing the results into doubt.

The league tables relied in part on automated checking against eight year-old guidelines, with researchers identifying 'more accessible' websites as those reporting less than 50 errors - a method denounced by accessibility experts as arbitrary and illogical.

Dan Champion, one of the country's most highly regarded local authority web managers and creator of Clackmannanshire Council's multi-award-winning website 'Clacksweb', was surprised to find the site failed Better Connected's accessibility tests.

Commenting on his popular weblog Blether.com, Champion said: "The single most important aspect of that flaw is this: syntactically valid HTML is not a primary indicator of web accessibility, and by the same token syntactically invalid HTML does not categorically indicate an inaccessible website."

He added: "The solution, however unpalatable... is to abandon the concept of ranking 468 websites for accessibility, and to stop testing them against an eight year-old set of guidelines.

"Instead Socitm should much more wisely employ the expertise of the highly skilled and knowledgeable staff at the RNIB to identify, highlight and promote best practice in web accessibility, both in the local government sector and beyond.

"The current state of affairs is like asking the Michelin Guide to judge restaurants on the quality of their cutlery."

Public Sector Forums, the independent network of public sector professionals, has also severely criticised this year's Better Connected, igniting discussion on its own website and that of the RNIB, which carried out the accessibility testing on behalf of Socitm.

Critics of the Society's league table also say the rankings fail to recognise differences in councils' website budgets, or take account of the huge efforts of many smaller authorities to make their sites as accessible as possible.

Ian Dunmore, Director of Public Sector Forums, said: "Socitm clearly doesn't have its members' interests at heart with the publication of this idiotic report.

"The issue of accessibility isn't the only example of where Better Connected is patently and demonstrably wrong.

"The time, effort and resources wasted in its production would have been far better spent helping web managers improve things rather than creating a meaningless yardstick with which to beat them".

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