On July 27, 2009, Laura Wesley wrote a very good article on Why government websites (still) suck. In her article, Laura explains a number of the practical and systemic causes for the slow pace of improvements to government sites. Laura also provides a list of six federal government sites, expanded to seven in the comments to her article, whose developers and designers she commends for the work they have done.

Wondering how accessible the sites that Laura commends are, I performed a very preliminary accessibility audit, from the perspective of a blind screen-reader user on two of the sites, and included one site of my own. The three sites are Health Canada, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and Copyright Consultations (the site I chose).

It is important to note that the following web-site evaluations are by no means exhaustive, and were not performed against any particular accessibility guideline. The following comments are reflective of my own user experience of the sites using the Firefox 3.5.2 web-browser and the JAWS 10.0.1154 screen-reader.

Health Canada

There were three major accessibility concerns that I noticed on the Health Canada web-site. These concerns, in no particular order, were the use of headings, the positioning of the text size adjustment controls, and the use of a rotating feature item.

Headings: the main page of the Health Canada site uses two level 1 and 6 level 2 headings. I won't critique the use of multiple level 1 headings, although others may. I will say that I did not find that it was easy to navigate to each navigational section of the page, for example the rotating feature item, by heading alone, and that the wording used for some headings did not give a clear description of the information to follow. For example, the heading "Current Subject" is followed by links like "About...", "Consumer Product Safety" and "Drugs & Health Products", to me none of these links are representative of the "Current Subject".

Text size adjustment: Being a completely blind user I rarely notice text size adjustment controls, they serve no purpose for me. However, I did happen to notice the controls on the Health Canada site, and noticed that they appear at the bottom of the page. Why is it important that these controls not be placed at the bottom of the page? Because there are some keyboard only users who would find it very difficult to try to navigate to the controls as they would have to tab through all of the other page content to reach the controls.

Rotating feature item: Just prior to the "Latest Headlines" heading is a strange combination of links and graphics, structured as a list. When I first approached this collection of six items I really had little idea what I was dealing with, and I've been at this a long time. The first three items were links with the text "1", "2", and "3", not particularly descriptive of the purpose and role of the links. The next two items were two linked images titled "Pause" and "Play", at this point I figured a video or audio object was to follow. The sixth item was a link with the text "Cell Phone Safety", no other information about cell phones appeared on this page, so if I missed this link the information wouldn't have been available to me. Without getting into to much detail of what I would have done differently, it suffices to say that providing more descriptive link text and a description of the purpose and role of this complex widget would have been helpful.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Citizenship and Immigration Canada web-site had the same three types of problems as Health Canada's web-site. However, I would say that Citizenship and Immigration did make a better use of headings.

Headings: The main page of the Citizenship and Immigration site uses 21 headings in total, this does seem like a little bit of overkill in the beginning, however it does nicely provide quick access to each grouping of navigational links. While navigating through the page, I also felt that each heading was a reasonably accurate description of the category of links to follow. Citizenship and Immigration does use 3 level 1 headings on their homepage., which does seem like an over usage of a heading whose purpose is to mark the beginning of a document, luckily at least one of these headings is actually used to mark the "Welcome to Citizenship and Immigration Canada" section of the page.

Copyright Consultations

The Copyright Consultations web-site did not appear to have text size adjustment controls, or a rotating feature item, but did exhibit a problem with headings, and quite a bit of repeating link text.

Headings: The main page of the Copyright Consultations site uses 13 headings, 2 at level 1 and 11 at level 2. As with the Citizenship and Immigration site, the headings seem to be reasonably descriptive of the grouping of links to follow. However, what I would have thought to be the main section of the page content "Welcome to the Copyright Consultation Website!", was not marked as a heading, and after reading through the rest of the document I would have likely not noticed this content other than that I was being thorough enough to write this evaluation.

Repeated link text: Most of the link text on the Copyright Consultations site is reasonably descriptive of the purpose of the link. However, the link text "Read and comment" appears on the page 15 times. For screen-reader users, it is important to ensure that link text provides an accurate description of the purpose of a link. The reasons for this are that many screen-reader users first familiarize themselves with a site by reading through a list of the links on the site, and they do not benefit from the context provided through visual grouping of different elements on the page.

Collaboration

Noticing some recurring accessibility problems in some, but not all, government sites, I wonder how much collaboration there is between developers in different departments. Ensuring a site's accessibility is a challenge, but one which is more easily accomplished in a collaborative work environment. For anyone who has not, I would encourage you to read my earlier article Common Look and Feel 2.0 and Drupal Collaboration, where I discuss a few of the benefits of collaboration. In short, why try to reinvent the accessibility wheel, when colleagues in other departments, or perhaps around the world, have already found the solution you're looking for?

Conclusion

None of the three federal government sites that I visited were amazingly accessible, nor were they amazingly inaccessible. The sites could have sucked less, but they certainly could have sucked more. Other than the general concept of collaboration, I would say that the developers of these sites should work on three major concepts. 1. The proper use of headings, to make their sites easier to navigate and understand. 2. Properly placing accessibility controls closer to the top of the page, to reduce the burden of finding and navigating to the controls. 3. Providing more descriptive link text, headings and instructions for complex user interface widgets.