UK Gov launches eAccessibility Forum
In case you missed it - this new website aims to inform the UK's eAccessibility Action Plan and promote best practice.
| Department for Culture, Media and Sport wrote: |
| A website designed to allow people to tell Government and businesses how to make the internet more accessible has been launched today by Communications Minister Ed Vaizey.
The eAccessibility Forum website offers people using and working on the internet the opportunity to discuss difficulties they have noticed in accessing websites and other online services and to promote best practice. |
View the press release or go straight to the eAccessibility Forum.
James Coltham - Local gov web manager by day, web and accessibility blogger at lunchtime, freelancer by night. Tweets at @prettysimple.
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A well-intentioned effort, I'm sure. But a few Google searches would answer more of their questions, and to a higher quality, than offering a comments box on their Wordpress-based website. (Also, "eaccessibility" probably isn't an accessible spelling. I struggle to recognise it. e-acessibility would be preferred, imho.)
Improving the signal-to-noise ratio is key to improving education for all digital stakeholders.
It seems the site only mentions BS8878 once. Perhaps I'm being a bit too dim to be accomodated under 'reasonable adjustments' but how does one navigate to the blog-like page that mentions BS8878? I only found it through a site-specific search in Google.
That entry contains a pingback to the Cabinet Office, specifically their Digital team, who like to Use Title-Case Lettering within their messages, without linking to the initiative these are referring to.
That aside, the existance of this actually rather sensible and balanced sub-site from the Cabinet Office hints at a the great mass of 'prior art'. Which all our regulars read about 10 years ago. (And which was easily Google'd in the subsequent couple of years; now is a tad more difficult due to noise.)
Of course, such initiatives as e-accessibility are welcome but there's so much duplication of effort in our industry. To move things forward requires taking the best information and helping it spread. Like our humble forum does, in a small-scale way.
A couple of other forums and several blogs also do this. But hundreds of forums and thousands of blogs merely re-distribute information which is not the best and ask questions which were figured out 10-15 years ago.
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