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The Australian Federal government recently launched grocerychoice, a website whose goal is to

[help] consumers find the cheapest supermarket chain in their area without having to compare hundreds of prices.

A laudable goal no doubt. But sadly, as our friends over at PropellerGlobal note, quoting news.com.au, it’s already attracted official complaints from people with disabilities for breaching the Disability Discrimination Act (made famous on the web after the action brought against SOCOG for the inaccessibility of the Sydney Olympics website).

News.com.au reports

the website failed the most basic level of the acceptable International Standards for Website Accessibility, the W3Cs WCAG 1.0 guidelines

(is this the first ever mainstream direct reference to of WCAG?)

Here’s what the website itself says about accessibility

followed the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines at http://www.w3.org/tr/wai-webcontent
followed The Guide to Minimum Web Site Standards – Accessibility from the Australian Government Information Office and
tested the site with various diagnostic and evaluation tools.

Let’s see how much that has helped them.

Let’s apply just the level 1 and 2 WCAG 1.0 criteria, using Cynthia Says , and see how it fares.

1.1 – use of alt text – fails. This really is the most basic level of accessibility compliance – if you don’t even meet this, by using alt attributes, then you haven’t even thought about accessibility, in my experience.

5.3 – Do not use tables for layout unless the table makes sense when linearized – fail

12.4 – Associate labels explicitly with their controls – fails

All in all, in 2008, for a brand new Federal Government high profile site (appearing in many national news stories on TV, radio and in print) this is frankly, pathetic. Particularly in the light of the claims made at the site about accessibility.

Beyond basic compliance issues, the site also uses highly problematic techniques such as

• “Flyout” menus extensively (in truth almost universally) for navigation. These are effectively render navigation inaccessible for folks using screen magnification, and anyone with less than ideal motor skills, or people using a site in less than ideal surroundings
• Failing to use HTML headings (screen reader software uses HTML headings to help users navigate pages)
• Using images for text (which zooms up in size very badly, if at all, presenting serious accessibility issues for many people with less than ideal eyesight, or devices where screen magnification is important (for example the iPhone))

But there’s more – zooming up text even one or two sizes completely breaks the page layout. This suggests the developers didn’t even use this most basic test of the robustness of their design.

This really is unacceptable.

Ok, so, while we are at it, let’s take a look at the quality of HTML and CSS (applying the sort of criteria we use for the McFarlane Prize, and I first developed back in 2005 for assessing adherence to best practice in major Australian web sites.)

It too is an embarrassment. We have div elements contained within span elements, the use of all kinds of invalid attribute values, and just plain old mangled HTML. As mentioned above, tables are used for layout, and simple things like HTML headings aren’t even attempted.

And this is just the front page.

How about the CSS? Well, mercifully now errors here (you’d be surprised how common CSS syntax errors are) but on the whole it’s pretty simple stuff – lots of classes (many with presentational rather than semantic or structural names) and a small number of descendent selectors. Very basic really.

There is just so much else wrong with the site – from the failure to let people use RSS to subscribe to ongoing survey price results (you can subscribe via email) to the search by postcode seemingly being broken. But these pale by comparison with the quality of the underlying code.

As I observed in my first “state of the web” survey in 2005 – the sites that adhere to best practices don’t do so by accident, but because the teams who build them make best practices in accessibility, usability, and coding an important goal. It’s quite clear, that despite the protestations of Grocerywatch regarding accessibility, this simply wasn’t the case when this site was built.

Now the government may well have a huge PR issue on their hands. Seems like in more than 8 years since SOCOG, we’ve still a lot to learn.