by eila in Accessibility, Civil and Human Rights, Government Reform, Media, Politics
Posted on April 19, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Last Modified on December 16, 2009 at 10:29 pm
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On March 19, 2009, the City of Somerville was one of the 118 recipients of an “e-government Award,” from Common Cause. This citation is given for providing online access to Board of Alderman agenda and minutes, budget information, and general by-laws. But, on closer inspection, Somerville came in “number one” for the most inaccessible website, with an outstanding 221 accessibility errors on its home page! The City of Somerville is a genuine loser when it comes to accessibility and inclusion.
It does not take extra resources and money to ensure that websites provide equally accessible information to readers and leaders of all ages and abilities who use assistive technologies to enjoy a level World Wide Web playing field. It requires knowledge, skill and will. Do Somerville’s elected leaders have the political will to include and respect all constituents in designing a better city?
As a local government website and a recipient of Federal funding, the City’s staff persons have free access to resources, tools and knowledge repositories to enable Somerville to comply with the Rehabilitation Act’s Section 508 Communications accessibility standards in all its programs.
Since at least July of 2006, I have alerted the city’s leaders and staff about many free resources to upgrade the City’s web accessibility, including the free Federal e-learning tools available to all at: http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm. In addition, I and others have continued to encourage the mayor’s designated ADA Coordinator, the Chief Information officer and Department directors to collaborate with knowledgeable community users and testers in order to improve the website’s useability, but to no avail: just a “stonewall” of silence at every attempt.
Aside from the Home page, other important programs linked on Somerville webpages also present barriers for people who use screen readers, etc. to enjoy a level playing field on the World Wide Web. Somerville’s Calendar page has 93 errors; the Mayor’s page clocks in at 70 errors; the Employment Opportunities page is not providing equal opportunities with its 36 errors; and, if a resident wishes to perform Online Transactions, they may be disabled by the 34 errors at that page. You can check the pages for yourself, using the WAVE tool at: http://wave.webaim.org/
Also please see the excellent discussions and teachings at: http://webaim.org/
My most recent attempt to interest the Chief Information officer (who accepted the e-government award for Somerville last month at the State House), was on November 1, 2008. In addition to a friendly note, I copied and pasted all the information found at http://www.ada.gov/websites2.htm . Again, I received no response or acknowledgement whatsoever, nor was there any improvement to the City’s website services. I hope this blog entry will awaken the Mayor and Mr. Viswanathan to their obligations and responsibilities to provide equally effective communications and information to all residents.
While Somerville had 221 errors, the majority of the awarded Cities and towns had less than 10 errors. Seven had no errors.
A WAVE audit of the accessibility errors (in numbers) found for each of the 118 Massachusetts cities and towns that received the “e-government” award this year from Common Cause/MA is found at:
Please note that the WAVE audit is only one step in the process. A genuine understanding of the issues, and a skillful application of the principles of creating accessible websites can only happen if there is a collaboration between diverse users and website architects.
UPDATE MAY 3, 2009: Common Cause has placed information and a link to this audit on their website’s e-government awards page at: http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=5027715 Scroll down to the bottom.
UPDATE December 16, 2009: The City of Somerville completed fixing these issues today! See 7th comment, below.
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Hi Eila! Thanks for raising awareness about the city’s neglect to making its website accessible to people using assistive technologies! Everyone deserves to be able to access information about the city government!
As webmaster for this blog, I am conscious of the fact that we have a long way to go in this arena as well, but then we don’t have the level of resources available to the city. Still, I’d like to work with you in figuring out simple solutions to making this blog more accessible.
For context, can you say how many Somerville residents use assistive technologies and would benefit from accessibility improvements to the city’s website?
So, just playing devil’s advocate for a moment, is it possible that Somerville’s website has so many more accessibility errors than other cities and towns, because its website is bigger?
Perhaps the number of errors should be normalized by the number of webpages analyzed?
Maybe some errors are not as bad as others, so it’s possible that Somerville has many small errors while another city has a few whoppers, right?
Just for clarification, you personally obtained these results, not Common Cause, right? Can you provide more info about your data collection procedures, including how you used the tool to obtain the results?
Any idea why CommonCause hasn’t incorporated accessibility into their evaluation metrics?
Another dimension of accessibility should be the availability of genuine translations of webpages into the dominant locally-spoken languages.
I would also like to see the city’s press releases, events calendar, job postings, and department updates (new files, new announcements, new policies, etc…) be published in a feed format like RSS, so that people can be alerted to updates immediately, rather than have to check the website periodically.
As co-chair of Somerville’s Human Rights Commission, I am working with city staff to update and improve the HRC’s city webpage. Hopefully, when the city hires someone for its open position of part-time web application developer, we will see some exciting new improvements on the website!
Thanks for all your effort!
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Hi Barry,
I WAVE’d somervillevoices.org by simply entering the url into http://wave.webaim.org/ (as described at the end of paragraph 5) and found no errors.
That’s how I performed the 118 checks- I entered the link into the WAVE tool. I used the links provided by Common Cause’s audit.
Then I looked more closely at Somerville’s website, page by page, asking the question: are the programs housed on Somerville’s website presenting barriers to readers using screen readers, etc? I reached out to several screen reader users to ask for their responses before I posted this article, but have not heard back from them.
I would appreciate it if you would examine the links I’ve provided and let us know what you’ve learned and what kinds of questions you would consider worth investigating after considering that information along with your experience and knowledge.
If you review the short report I’ve mentioned at the end of my post, it should also answer some of your other questions. Common Cause responded immediately and appreciatively to my communication regarding this accessibility criteria last year. This year, I wrote to them a day before before this post, and I’m guessing they haven’t seen the email yet.
Somerville’s numbers were outstandingly off the charts. There are less than 15 of the 118 cities and towns that even have over 30 WAVE-detected errors. The link to that short report is found at the end of my post, above.
Regarding one of your hypothesis, I’d have to guess that the City of Boston has a larger website than Somerville’s, yet their WAVE-detected errors numbered only 14. Please let us know what kinds of questions are shaped by your research, OK?
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eila, I’m just now realizing that your WAVE audit was only performed on the homepages of the municipal websites. You also mentioned analyzing deeper webpages on Somerville’s site, but I understand now that that deeper research is not reflected in your report. Of course, if we analyzed all the webpages on each site, we might find that another city has more overall problems than Somerville, but I think your research is a good starting point. I will follow your links and try to learn more about best practices. Thanks!
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Actually, I also did check several other city sites a bit more comprehensively. (“deeper” isn’t an appropriate term, since I was comparing, not analyzing.) I was curious about the same type of question. Home pages are busier and have the most errors, and other pages have many less errors. So, for example, a city with 3 WAVE errors on their home page would generally have 2, 1, or none on the other, less busy pages.
Since you are in the industry, your analysis will be appreciated after you investigate.
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Also, In the interests of details, my audit was performed exactly on the site links provided by Common Cause’s e-government announcement. Therefore, some of the city sites were not home pages, they were the pages that included links to the pertinent reports, as included in the current award’s criteria.
It seems that you have the ability to answer your own questions, so please let us know your conclusions after you’ve investigated, OK?
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Barry has suggested that I offer some numbers regarding how many Somervillians might be impacted if our local government’s website was updated per the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (which developed and continues to improve the free WAVE tool mentioned above).
So first i’ll note that constituents with various visual, hearing, motor and cognitive differences may be using screen readers and other assistive technology to access the internet. The WAVE tool looks at many issues and covers a cross-disability population, which includes “normal” issues of aging.
Second, I can offer the following quote from the May 2008 Somerville Journal op-ed, called: “The Meaning of ‘Legally Blind” at: http://www.wickedlocal.com/somerville/archive/x1993301117
“The 2006 American Community Survey reports that Somerville has 1,892 individuals over the age of 20 with a sensory disability, defined as a severe vision or hearing impairment…”
So, here’s 2 questions for all our readers:
1. Would you consider it a worthy investment of time and energy for the IT staff to make the City of Somerville’s website accessible to all potential readers?
2. If so, what kinds of arguments would you present to our city deciders to encourage them to close that gap, known as the “digital divide?”
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SOMERVILLE, MA December 16, 2009: The City of Somerville has fixed these website issues. Today if you go to the City’s home page and WAVE it, you will only find 4 accessibility errors. If you go to the Pay Bills Online page, you will only find one error. That’s an immense improvement!
Bravo to City staff Brian McCarthy and Steve Craig, who took the initiative to care about this issue!
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