Dissident

Web 2.0 vs Accessibility

NOTE: THIS ITEM ALSO POSTED TO STEVE-DALE.NET, WHICH IS NOW MY MAIN BLOG.

I attended an "Enterprise 2.0" event last week where Ian Lloyd gave a very thought provoking presentation on the impact of Web 2.0 on accessibility. Ian is a web developer working for the Nationwide Building Society, and clearly knows his stuff when it comes to designing websites that will accommodate assistive technologies - such as screen readers, voice to text and screen magnifiers.

This was particularly relevant to the work I'm presently doing in building on-line environments for support of Communities of Practice in the public sector, where accessibility standards and guidelines for websites is far more rigorously enforced than in the private sector. Conforming to standards such as W3C Web Accessibility Initiative is a given, but websites must also conform to guidance such as Delivering Inclusive Websites, issued by the COI.

Personally, I have some sympathy with developers of 'social media-rich' websites (which I'll categorise as being 'Web 2.0') in that it's quite difficult to find the right balance between accessibility and making the site appealing to a mass audience. Clearly Facebook comes to mind here. However, I'm not sure that vendors/developers do enough to ensure that they have catered for the disabled minority. For example, the Captcha processes used on a growing number of websites are fairly difficult to negotiate even for someone with 20:20 vision.

I don't necessarily think that Social Media has to mean poor accessibility, yet there seems to be a sort of tacit acceptance that this is the case . I'm now far more aware of my obligations in striving to make the CoP platform available to a more diverse audience and will be taking steps to in the next development phase to ensure we're meeting the required guidelines and best practice.

Two very useful resources for anyone interested in issues around accessibility and diversity are Abilitynet and the Shaw Trust.

Social Media User's Bill of Rights

Came across this today, which seems to be gathering a body of support. I like the sentiments; pity it's not enforceable!

Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington have authored a bill of rights for users of the social web. The bill states:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

Blogging Policy

I've recently seen a number of conversations in the blogosphere from people asking about corporate blogging policies, since I assume their companies are getting nervous about what their employees might  be saying via the cyber medium. Sun met this issues head on about 3 years ago, and actively encouraged their employees to blog by providing them with dedicated server space. Their blogging policy is as good as any I've seen.  Pity that all companies don't encourage this level of transparency (I'm not a Sun employee by the way!). 

On-line interaction and fear of the unknown

An excellent commentary and explanation about on-line facilitation from Nancy White over at Full Circle. Very topical for me at the moment as I begin a new contract working as Interim Head of the Information Authority, a new Secretariat sponsored by the DfES and the LSC. One of the key responsibilities for this newly established body (the Information Authority) is to balance need against burden for all information and reporting requirements across the education sector.

My initial thoughts were along the lines of establishing a facilitated stakeholder community, consisting of all interested people, groups and agencies across the further education sector, and through this 'community', encourage  transparency on the impact (burden) of requests for new or changed information. Typical changes are in the way that schools and colleges measure success, and change requests can originate from many different sources, from Ministers and government bodies (e.g. Ofsted) to individual schools and colleges.

However, I soon learnt there is a language issue to overcome first. My initial soundings on the concept of using an on-line community approach to evaluate, process and agree changes to data standards and reporting requirements did not go down too well, and the concept of employing on-line facilitator's for managing change though this embryonic community was akin to talking about encounters of the third kind!

However, I've made some headway by making sure that instead of discussing  'communities', I refer instead to 'stakeholder collaboration', which is going to require 'change coordinators' to manage discussion and connections between the stakeholders (thus, for on-line facilitator, read 'change coordinator).

So lesson learnt here - speak the language that  people  you are working with understand.   The concepts of communities (of interest or of practice) and on-line facilitation are steps into the unknown for some people, and  anything unknown is perceived as a project risk!

More of this later when I've either been given the go ahead (or not) to progress with my 'stakeholder collaboration' and 'change coordinator' strategy.

My thanks to Nancy for enabling me to produce the job specification for my 'change coordinators' from her posting!

Social Media Glossary

David Wilcox over at Designing for Civil Society has done an excellent job in putting together a social media glossary. I'm sure this will become a definitive reference source for many people involved in this fascinating and developing topic, and the fcat that it's available under a Creative Commons licence will promote its widespread use across a plethora of other web sites.

It also stimulated me to think once more about creating a wiki glossary of local government terms. Something I was keen on doing during my previous tenure as Head of Knowledge at the IDeA, but it floundered against a whole raft of other priorities.  The observant reader may note there is already a glossary of terms on the IDeA web site, but this in not definitive, and barely keeps up to date with the changing initiatives happening across the public sector. I wonder if there is any interest out there in demystifying some of the jargon used in local gov?

 

What good is IPSV?

I've previously commented on this topic and think I've made my views fairly clear. However, it's comforting to know that I'm not alone in questioning whether IPSV serves any useful purpose.

I picked up a report on a recent meeting of local authority webmasters and managers held in Birmingham (England), where most present appeared to conclude that IPSV, now the official Government Metadata Standard, served no useful purpose and should be ignored and not implemented. As a delegate at the meeting pointed out, search engines don’t use government metadata - at all. IPSV is not used. So really then, what is the point?  The report went on to say that delegates wree not sold on formal taxonomies for websites, and definitely not centralised taxonomies like this Vocabulary. The ability to produce a site map from a taxonomy is a benefit, but a fringe benefit at best. Current thinking appears to be arriving at a much less prescriptive model of metadata, in which, rather than forcing editors to select a term from a taxonomy for the area of business the content relates to, they’re provided a ‘finger buffet’ of metadata to choose from, including schemes for geographic, demographic, subject (i.e. topic) and business tags. (I think we're heading into the realms of folksonomies here).

However, this will no doubt upset those that want to see a tidy hierarchical view made possible by a formal taxonomy, but does that matter if it provides vastly richer possibilities in terms of interrogating and presenting content?

One of the central selling points of LGCL and now IPSV was the broad view of government services relating to a given term (e.g. see everything that all government agencies and local authorities have on animal welfare), but the reality is that's both a pipe-dream and of absolutely no use to the vast majority of users.  A broad view of government services however that relate to, say, a single mother, under 30, recently made redundant, with children under 5 living in Birmingham would be of real value. This is only possible though if one gets away from thinking like librarians and stops trying to neatly categorise every single one of a council’s services and information nodes based on universally understood terms.

Government web site rankings

Interesting fact: eGMS – so much for the government's "mandatory" metadata requirement; 73% of central and 42% of local government websites fail the requirements on every single page, including important sites such as direct.gov.uk, the Cabinet Office, and Number 10. Indeed, the "e-GIF Accreditation Authority" site itself makes no attempt at all to comply!

Have long thought that the IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary) is becoming meaningless - seems many local authority web sites are ignoring it - or at least only 'pretending' to comply by allocating one term (e.g. 'Local Gov') from the list to their subject tag for web pages I mean, why bother when search engines can provide more accurate subject context from analysing all the content from the page?! Still, more on this topic later...it's primary source of irritant for me!

For more details on central and local gov web site rankings, check out Sitemorse

The Dissident