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Relaunched Recovery.gov Fails Accessibility Standards
SethGrimes writes with this excerpt from Information Week's Intelligent Enterprise: "Recovery.gov, a showcase government-transparency Web site that relaunched on Monday, fails to meet US federal government Section 508 accessibility standards and accessibility best practices. The non-compliance issues relate to display of data tables — an essential point given the site's promise of 'Data, Data & More Data' — despite on-site compliance claims. Other elements including navigation maps, while compliant, are poorly designed. Sharron Rush, co-founder and executive director of accessibility-advocacy organization Knowbility, goes so far as to state, 'The recovery.gov Web site is a good example of what NOT to do for accessibility in my opinion.' Louise Radnofsky explains in the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire blog, 'Expectations are high for the site, not least because of its hefty price tag: Smartronix, a Maryland contractor, is being paid $9.5 million for its initial overhaul and is likely to get another $8.5 million to keep the site running through 2014.' Compliance with Section 508 of the federal Rehabilitation Act — a baseline expectation — is a long-standing federal-government requirement for information-systems accessibility to persons with disabilities. The site's accessibility failures — which are shared by another showcase government-transparency site, USAspending.gov — are nonetheless easily seen."
If the Feds paid nearly 10 million bucks for that I am obviously in the wrong line of work. It looks like something I could knock off in a few weeks with Django and MySQL.
The site does very little if you don't have Flash, BTW. Many pages don't even give you a "You don't have Flash" message. You just get blank white pages. I make a point of not having Flash on my main Linux box, just to see how this tool of the devil is poisoning the net.
...laura
Bullshit. There is nothing inherently 'visual' about data. The function of the site is to make lists and numbers relevant to the operation of the government available to the public. All of the public. That task does not require the use of "Web 2.0" crap. If you think that the data can be better presented in the form of swarms of crawling colored beetles set up your own site, copy over the data (or just link to it) and have at it. It's all in the public domain.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If the Feds paid nearly 10 million bucks for that I am obviously in the wrong line of work. It looks like something I could knock off in a few weeks with Django and MySQL.
First start a company. Then make campaign contributions to the incumbent politicians that are part of the committee that overseas these things. Start in the Senate. Of course, you'll have to get around the campaign finance laws, but don't worry, there are plenty of law firms that can help - for a very nice price.
That' s not enough though! You also need a lobbying firm to lobby other politicians and the Government offices that also have input - there are folks that will do that for a nice price too.
Now, there will be others who will do the same, so you'll have to be very strategic and get the best advisers.
Now, after winning the contract, just outsource the actual design and implementation to the lowest bidder, and keep the profits; which in this case $10 million minus $5-6 million in campaign contributions and lobbyists less $200,000 (let's be generous!) for the actual software development, leaves you a profit of $3.8 million to $4.8 million.
Of course, you may have to go overseas because, as every CIO says, there are no qualified American programmers and they have to go overseas for the talent! All those people that don't have jobs out in the market now aren't qualified - even though the companies that used to employ them found them to be qualified for years but had to let them go for cost cutting purposes. They're out of work so there must be something wrong with them!
But wait! There's more!
You won't book the $3.8 to $4.8 million! You'll have other expenses and things to pay, tax write-offs and whatnot that will leave you with a loss. Then of course, there's going to be tax credits that will enable you and your buddies to get more money out of the American Taxpayer.
That is how you make money with Government contracts.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Even those with sight can benefit from a properly designed site. Color schemes that look fine to you or I can be a nightmare for someone with color blindness.
Even though the web may primarily be a visual medium, it can be navigated without relying only on eyes. People with more severe visual impairments regularly surf the web with text-to-speech software assisting them. Poor design, such as misusing tables in place of [div], [span] and other proper formatting makes things tough, as does the practice of using a jpeg as a link button, and not tagging it with the appropriate text to indicate what it is for.
The government has an obligation to be as open as possible to all its citizens.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Our company developer the Trouble Asset Relief Program's site, at http://www.financialstability.gov/
I am happy to report, MOSTLY compliant with Section 508.
And it has cool stuff, too.
- Ubique, Tom Termini www.bluedog.net - WebObjects / J2EE SOA / iPhone solutions for knowledge workers
Quick comparison:
Recovery.gov
Recovery.com
While showing the data in page format is definitely more accessible from the POV of a screen reader, the graphical map is more useful in terms of finding out how money is being spent around where I live.
The recovery.gov website is actually pretty good, in under a minute I was finding how funds were being allocated in my neighborhood.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Does this really surprise anybody?
Actually yes, the level of "badness" is kind of staggering on this one. There are other "decent" federal and state websites (whitehouse.gov, ca.gov) so I expected that the code would be something that's at least comparable.
When I first read the article (shocking I know) I thought it was just someone trying to nitpick or that the editor is another Obama-troll, so midway through it I visited the site to view the source code myself and I almost threw up.
There are a bazillion (that's 2 LOC right?) JS and CSS includes, XML declaration tags in the middle of the page, tables for layout (top navigation), the works.
For fun, I disabled JavaScript and CSS, and the first few lines that someone without JS/CSS would see are truly amusing:
You are leaving the Recovery.gov Website
Click the link to access
exit
We hope your visit was informative and enjoyable.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
I'm actually surprised that the article left all these issues and picked tables and forms to discuss.
If you can't mod them join them.
If the site has to interface with older, obscure, and/or legacy databases in other government divisions in order to gather its data, then that will eat up a lot of time and money. I suspect that the front end was the cheapest part. It's the back end that probably had the I.T. guys pulling out their hair.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
I'm actually glad for this website, as it just reaffirms my belief that this stimulus bill is a load of shit. Most of the recipients of grant money in my local area are accountants and attorneys, who are the ones driving around in Porches and Bimmers while not creating tons of jobs for local citizens. Hurray for progress.
If accessibility is a major concern, you have at least one blind person on your staff that must approve the layout. I worked with a blind DBA for a year and had the luxury of having him critique a website of mine for accessibility and implemented all his recommendations. The changes weren't all that difficult since I don't use evil crap like flash in the first place.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Pages have been designed to avoid a screen-flicker frequency greater than 2Hz and lower than 55 Hz.
So... what frequency does that leave? Could anyone tell me what I'm missing here?
I would think anything lower than 55Hz would also be lower than 2Hz, and anything greater than 2Hz would be greater than 55Hz, so.... I'm a little confused.
(And, yes, I did ask my friend Google, although if anyone could give me a gentle push toward a search term better than "Hertz", I'd be appreciative.)