[LINK] Alston's $4m website

[Viveka]

At 1:42 PM +1000 3/4/03, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,6227857%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html
>TAXPAYERS have been stung for more than $4 million, after a project to
>rebuild the website of communications and IT minister Richard Alston
>suffered a massive blowout from its initial budget of $600,000.

It gets worse. The site *is not even valid HTML*. And I'm not 
nitpicking about a couple of arguably necessary kludges. There are 
three hundred and ninety-seven basic errors in the first page alone.

397 errors in one page. Not a complex page either - it contains only 
350 lines of code, which means there is at least one error in every 
line of code.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dcita.gov.au%2FSubject_Entry_Page%2F0%2C%2C0_1-2_1%2C00.html

They're shooting for an outdated DTD (HTML 3.2), which is fine, 
although not exactly futureproof (and not what I'd expect for $4M), 
but they're failing to even come close to validating to that DTD, 
which is absurd.

It looks like the site has around 5,000 pages (excluding 
"printer-friendly" versions of pages, better done these days with a 
print-specific stylesheet anyway)...

Here's a strange error: the site's stylesheet is at
http://www.dcita.gov.au/DoCITA/Custom/DoCITA/Stylesheet/0,6404,,00.html
It's good they're using stylesheets, but why is it named as an html 
file? Stylesheets are supposed to be .css. I've never seen anyone 
make this error before, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if some 
browsers refused to read the stylesheet.

Under Australian law, this website is required to be accessible 
(defined in the SOCOG case as meeting at least the Level 1 WAI 
requirements). Since the site doesn't validate, it doesn't pass even 
the first hurdle of accessibility.

I've certainly seen less accessible sites - it doesn't require 
JavaScript or plugins to render crucial content, for example. And it 
does have <alt> tags. On the other hand, it doesn't look like they've 
thought through how they're using the <alt> attribute - for example
    Bullet intellectual property
    Bullet post
    Bullet sport
    Bullet telecommunications
would be irritating to hear on a screen reader. In fact, this whole 
section is silly. They've used a nested table with little square 
bullet images in one column, and the related text in the other 
column. A more sane thing to do would just be to use HTML's Unordered 
List tags, and use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to use little square 
images for the bullets.

Which brings me to the most clear accessibility error here; they've 
used a complex series of nested tables to lay out the site, way more 
than necessary. Screen readers do not deal with this well at all. It 
looks like they've got lost in their own table code as well, which 
could be contributing to the very large number of HTML errors.

Oh dear.

V.
-- 
Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut.
{ http://www.karmanaut.com | http://www.planet-earth.org
    http://www.MacWeb3D.org | http://sydney.siggraph.org.au }
Hypermedia, virtual worlds, human interface, truth, beauty.