The ACT Government invited citizens to test their new Open Government website. The home page failed an automated web accessibility test (TAW W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 1.0), with four Priority 1 and two priority 2 problems. It also failed a W3C Markup Validation Service test, with 11 errors. The page scored 0 out of 100 on the W3C mobileOK Checker, with 2 critical, 3 severe1 medium and 5 low failures.
I suggest the ACT Government needs to bring the quality of its web pages up to an acceptable standard. In particular the ACT Government is required to comply with the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992. Failing to provide access to services on-line for those with a disability is unlawful. I posted a comment on this to the ACT Government's Time To Talk discussion forum.
It was pointed out that I had conducted tests on the ACT Open Government site using version 1 of the W3C WCAG guidelines. I re-ran the test with the newer WCAG 2.0. The automated TAW test reported three "Perceivable" problems.
ReplyDeleteAlso I reran the WCAG 1.0 test and found the site now passes the automated tests.
The page now has nine HTML errors, down from eleven.
I reran some automated web tests on the ACT Open Government page. The page now has no HTML errors.
ReplyDeleteThe page also scores 45% on the W3C mobileOK Checker (up from zero previously).
The page could be improved by optimizing the images, halving the amount of data to be downloaded. As an example, the photo of the Chief Minister Kathy Gallagher is in PNG format, when it should be JPEG.