Grocerychoice — Accessibility disaster (to put it kindly)
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.
But checkitout John, it’s got drop shadows. It always amazes me when sites imitate the design tropes of Web 2.0 while remaining blissfully unaware of the browser technology driving it.
How could I have failed to see that! :-)
john
wow, it always surprises me to see layout in tables nowadays but I thought gov sites were supposed to be on the ball with this type of stuff.
Thankyou for taking up this issue John. It is of paramount importance and we would like to join you in congratulating and supporting his case.
[…] 18 checkpoints of the WCAG 1.0 priority guidelines that failed assessment. John Allsop of Web Directions South discovered many other problems with the site, including failure to use ALT textual equivalents, […]
John to be fair on a Govt agency the use of RSS is often beyond them.
1) RSS s often blocked at the corporate firewall
2) If managers don’t use RSS they are not going to support it are they.
3) RSS technology use. As you know the real community, not us “uber geeks”, doesn’t use RSS at all. It’s just too techie for them. It’s going to be years until RSS is excepted by the real world. Until then Govt being conservative will not implement.
Gary,
I can see plenty of reasons why it isn’t used, but it is still frankly pathetic, IMO.
j
I’d actually take your comment further, John. Not only should they offer RSS at ‘the edges’ (e.g., to subscribe to updates for your neighbourhood), all of the data should be available in RSS, Atom or other open formats.
There’s a growing body of research that governments shouldn’t be in the business of presenting data to end users (except for perhaps the most bare-bones views); rather, it has a responsibility to do everything it can to assure that the data it has available is as widely disseminated and easy to reuse — both technically and legally — as possible.
If GC’s underlying data were available, we’d likely have a huge basket (pun intended) of desktop widgets, iPhone apps, mashup sites, and integrations into places like Yahoo7 and 9MSN. We’d be able to relate it to existing and not-even-thought-of information, and repurpose it as we see fit.
As it is, we have one crappy, nearly useless site with silo’d data and a disappointing UI. I don’t even want to know how much it cost.
Gary —
Can you give more details about firewalls blocking RSS? I haven’t seen this in the wild or heard of it much.
Mark,
very much so — I lost sight of the whole data/api thing so irritated was I at the user experience/accessibility aspects.
I was going to write about crowdsourcing the data — you know, rather than one anonymous shopper a month, build infrastructure to let people email, sms, and otherwise provide pricing data based on their shopping experiences.
If you’d like to hear more about that, I’ll be touching on it here
http://lgwebnetwork.org/conference/
in my keynote presentation
john
The alt tags are for 1x1 pixel images… Also the site is being updated to conform to W3C / WAI standards within the next week or so.
Tom,
I have a sinking feeling the 1x1 pixel images are associated with the table based layout?
john
Spacer images — used for the menu and various other things… Often put in via photoshop export etc
Interesting-looking conf, thanks!
[…] Graeme Innis said Making information as socially important and highly publicised as the GROCERYchoice website and the green paper on carbon emissions trading inaccessible to a significant sector of the […]
It looks like with the new release of pricing information for this — some of the Website Accessibility issues have been fixed (text resizes now — it has meta tags — some images gone in favour of text )
wow, it always surprises me to see layout in tables nowadays but I thought gov sites were supposed to be on the ball with this type of stuff.
As a Government web developer I did too, and I do believe agencies TRY to keep their websites accessible, but the trouble is there’s a culture of everything being done at the very last minute and so of course usability and accessibility always suffer.
As someone who’s passionate about both it’s incredibly frustrating! We do the best we can do but at the end of the day it’s the managers who call the shots, not the web developers. It will be a happy day when accessibility is policed as harshly here in Australia as it already is overseas.
[…] Government’s fabled GroceryWatch website has been scrapped. We wrote critically about the dire accessibility of the site when it first launched. In the meantime, consumer advocacy magazine Choice had taken over the project from the […]