Council sites need better accessibility

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The past ten years of council websites have shown improvements, but there's more work to be done on accessibility, the tenth annual Socitm Better Connect report has said.

Four sites from over 500 across the UK have been rated excellent - East Sussex, Gloucestershire, Salford City and Tameside - compared to just one last year, Barking and Dagenham, which failed to make this year's cut over accessibility issues.

Indeed, the number of sites receiving a top rating for accessibility fell from 14 per cent last year to 10 per cent this year, leading the body to announce a special supplement on accessibility later this month. "The biggest area of weakness is accessibility," Martin Greenwood, programme manager for Socitm Insight and author of the report said. "It's across the board...and gotten slightly worse."

He admitted it's no easy feat to make a website accessible. "It's just hard to get it right and keep on top of it," he said. One major area tripping up council websites is having alternate tags for images. Simply tagging images correctly means speech synthesizer systems can read the page, but failing to do so renders them unreadable. It seems an easy fix, but given most websites have thousands of images, it's difficult to maintain, he said.

Improving accessibility requires senior decision makers to accept the importance of it, as well as sensible buying decisions, better training for writers and web editors, and better web management processes, he said.

But he noted that most government sites are better with accessibility than the private sector. "There are stronger reasons for making sites accessible, as the general objective is about equality and avoiding discrimination - the private sector is not as concerned,"

The numbers of unique visitors for such sites jumped 10 per cent, down from an increase of 22.5 per cent last year, but still a clear sign of growth.

Greenwood said: "Ten years ago ... perhaps 29% of the population had online access, and nobody certainly had much idea about how the internet was used. In 2008, where access to the internet is widespread, debate should centre on encouraging greater levels of take-up of online services and on guiding the customer's journey easily and quickly to find that key service or piece of information. The state of the council website, though critical in that journey, should now be part of a broader strategy of improving customer access across all channels of delivery."

According to the study, the top council sites are:

Barking & Dagenham

Bracknell Forest

Brighton & Hove

Clackmannanshire

East Riding of Yorkshire

East Sussex CC

Gloucestershire CC

Greenwich

Haringey

Merton

North Lincolnshire

Nottingham City

Richmond

Rochdale MBC

Salford City

Southwark

Stockton-on-Tees BC

Tameside MBC

Trafford MBC

West Lindsey DC

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