2003

The Government and Usability

• Question: Why is usability important with respect to government services?

Usability is important irrespective of (whether) people use government services. I think it is very important particularly when you think about the audience the government has, which is everyone in the UK and every business in the UK. There is a wide range of businesses and a wide range of people and therefore you have to try to make government information and transactions available in a very usable way to all sorts of different people, at different levels of skills with different levels of knowledge and different abilities. Therefore, it is of particular importance for us, compared to say an organisation just selling to a particular narrow group of people. They can define their audience much more precisely and target usability just at them, so it is crucial and essential to what we do.

Accessibility

• Question: You spoke about accessibility during your speech and how important it is for government websites. Some while ago there was a report, which claimed that 75% of Government websites were not accessible. Are the government websites aware they are not accessible and also what are they planning to do about it in the next couple of years to make themselves more accessible?

There are a number of government websites that are used extremely heavily, e.g. the Number 10 website is obviously used a lot, particularly by journalists, the Inland Revenue site, the National Health Service, and NHS Direct site all dominate government internet access. They're all very good sites and they get awards for accessibility. There are a few sites that should be more accessible and aren't and we'll try to focus on those...

Sites should be aware of their accessibility. We recommend that people do test their sites for accessibility and we suggested how they might do that in our latest document that was introduced in July, which is about accessibility on government websites, (and is) recommended to webmasters on how they should check whether their sites are usable or not and we expect them to follow the recommendations. **

• Question: Who should be setting the accessibility standards?

I think the people who know a lot about accessibility are the experts. That's what the conference today was about.

Any large organisation would be daft not to listen to an accessibility expert when they are devising their websites so that they can appeal to their customers. I'd appeal to anyone that's building a website to make sure they get good advise about accessibility issues exactly the same way as they would get technical advise on IT issues to do with the design. Secondly, the government has a particular responsibility in dealing with issues such as social inclusionto firstly set it's own house in order by making sure that its information provisions are accessible to people. Hopefully that example will also help other people decide that that's what they want to do as well.

If you are suggesting we go further than that and legislate for the standards of all websites. It is a totally impractical thing to do as, a lot of the websites people look at in the UK are based outside the UK, and my only inclination I would have to say is, that the government should set an example by doing it for themselves. Where it can make a difference in propagating international standards of accessibility we should try to do that but we can't make people who are putting information on the web do things they don't necessarily want to do. Mainly because it is unenforceable and secondly, if it is a commercial organisation that is trying to sell something, their markets will tell them if it is accessible or not and as a result will simply fail.

Funding for government websites

• Question: Many local government site managers claim that they do not have enough budget to make their sites usable and accessible. How can these government sites make their sites accessible?

I think web access offers a real opportunity for Local Authorities, just as it does for Central Government, to improve the delivery of their services to their voters. I think it is also an opportunity for them to make sure (that) they can make themselves efficient organisations. In some respect the web can help them minimise their costs.

So I personally feel that a local council just like central government needs to think really hard about the real benefits they will receive if they tackle web access properly, both in terms of providing a better service to people and also providing a cheaper service to people. They should allocate their resources accordingly.

There are times when it would make no sense to pile a lot of money into a particular service when actually it can be more effectively and more efficiently done through a call centre or through face-to-face contact. There is a range of areas where that is not the case and where web access reduces the work loads of hard-pressed staff in local call centres or staff dealing with people face to face, subsequently relieving them and resulting in money well spent. The individual councils have to decide what is important for them at a local level.

You will see over the next year or so, firstly the number of sites diminishing as we try to weed out sites that don't need to be there. Secondly, the sites that are here will become much more usable and better focused on their customers and their audience and will be accessible to everyone that needs to have access to them.

Reflections on the role of e-Envoy

• Question: You have held the position of e-Envoy for three years now. Now that you are coming to the end of your term as the e-Envoy, what legacy would you like to leave behind?

There is a large amount of people involved here not just in my office. I shall look back with some pride, not just on my behalf but also on behalf of all the other people who have been working with us. The fact that we have made a huge amount of progress on allowing physical access to the internet, we have gone from no UK Online Centres to 8,000 net. Every library has Internet access. 99% of schools now have internet access. On the physical access side, we have done an enormous job.

Secondly we have done a tremendous job in helping people use the internet. Internet access by the majority of the population is now a given. Most people now regularly use the internet and it is now entered into the language people use. We have done quite a lot compared to other countries and are working hard to make the UK a leading nation.

One of the big issues around the time I arrived was 'Broadband' and an awful lot has been done not just by the government but also by particular telecommunications companies, particularly British Telecom and their new Chief Executive, Ben Verwaayen. Ben came into the job 20 months ago saying he was going to make Broadband something he lived or died by. He said if he jumped off a cliff shouting Broadband, his only hope was that the rest of the company followed him. I think we are part of the influence that made them emphasise that so much and I'm very proud of that.

I think we also made huge strides on the government side. We really got the debate going on how we get people to use government websites, three years ago we didn't have people talking about how we use these things and now we do. We now recognise that it is just as important to make them usable as it is to make them available, and that is important around the customer focus area and in particular it is about making the sites themselves look good, be usable by anybody that should be using them, be readable and understandable by them and be easily followed and easily found, and I think we have made massive strides. There's still along way to go but we wouldn't be having the similar debates were having now, two years ago and I'm very pleased about it.

** You will find a copy of the quality framework document at the Office of the e-Envoy website. Please scroll down on the page for the document titled Quality Framework for UK government website design.

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