Monday, December 12, 2011

Australian Disaster Information Smart Phone App

The Australian Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, launched a "DisasterWatch" for Apple iPhones and Google Android on 8 December 2011. The app provides information on "disaster events" using information provided by state emergency authorities. The application does not provide emergency alerts. Also there is no provision of this information via the web, or in any other format, only for iPhone and Android smart phone users.

The Australian Emergency Management Institute needs to improve this application by providing emergency alerts and also providing the same information via a web page and in other online formats.

A good first step would be to correct the errors in the Attorney General's Department Australian Emergency Management web pages. The AEM home page has 77 Errors in the HTML. It also scores zero out of 100 on the W3C mobileOK Checker, with 3 critical, 5 severe, 2 medium and 6 low failures.

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