[LINK] PM take on Al Gore with Web Slides?

[Tom Worthington]

On 31 May the Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading, lead 
by Dr Peter Shergold, released its Final Report. The document is 
offered in RTF, Microsoft Word and PDF format. But the files are all 
large and do not appear to have been prepared with accessibly in 
mind. As a result they are more difficult to read than they need be. 
In about 30 minutes I was able to modify one section to make it 
smaller and more readable 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/06/prime-ministerial-task-group-on.html>.

The same day, Brian Hardy from Vision Australia, presented some of 
the results of a government funded study of how to make PDF documents 
accessible to the disabled 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/06/web-microformats-for-coordinated.html>. 
At question time, someone pointed out that Government agencies were 
required to comply with Australia law, by making such reports 
accessible to the disabled: if this was too hard to do with PDF they 
could use ordinary web pages.

Given that the Emissions Trading report was a very high profile one, 
overseen by the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, 
it is disappointing that the opportunity was not taken to make the 
report very easy to read. It is unlikely that Dr Shergold will be 
required to appear in court to defend a complaint of having 
unlawfully discriminated against disabled people by producing an 
inaccessible web site (contrary to the Disability Discrimination 
Act). But a better web design could be used to respond to the "Al Gore Effect".

Al Gore had a considerable impact on the climate change debate with 
his presentation "An Inconvenient Truth" 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2006/10/inconvenient-truth.html>. This 
was a slide show presentation, a documentary film and a booklet. Any 
response to this needs to provide a similar easy to read format. The 
Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading report does not do that.

With a few hours work, the Australian report could be reformatted as 
an accessible web page, with an accompanying set of web slides. More 
work could be done to add an Al Gore type audio commentary to the 
slides. This would result in the report being seen by many thousands 
of times as many people and having much more impact.

A well formatted web version of the report would improve its search 
ranking. A few weeks ago I ran a one day course on how to optimize 
web pages for reading and web search (so called Search Engine 
Optimization or SEO). My approach is to produce accessible web pages, 
which are easy for people and machines to read 
<http://tomw.net.au/moodle/course/view.php?id=3>. Simple web based 
slide presentations can also increase the impact of information by 
providing quick and easy to read summaries of the information 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/05/slides-in-web-pages.html>. A 
byproduct of this would eb the material would be available for 
podcasting and to Blackberry type devcies.

Of course it may be that the members of the members of the Prime 
Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading would not see it as their 
place to push the report. They may see that having delivered the 
report to the PM, their job was done: it was up to someone else to 
distribute and promote the report's findings. But then why go to the 
trouble to have illustrations included in the report and it nicely 
typeset for printing: why not just deliver a typed manuscript in 
Courier 12 point? For the amount of money spent on typesetting the 
report for high quality printing a well designed web presentation 
could have been produced, which would be read by many thousands of 
times as many people and have much more impact.

ps: Providing easy to read web pages can provide other benefits. I 
wrote about how the two "Landing Helicopter Dock" (LHD) 
ships  Australia is planning to purchase might use UAVs 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/05/automated-uav-operations-from-ships.html>. 
These sort of web pages have been popular with the defence community 
and have attracted advertisements for products, including LHD ships 
(yes: billion dollar ships are advertised on the web). I doubt that 
these pages are popular because of their content; they are just more 
simply formatted and so easier to find than those from company and 
government sources.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml