Local Democracy

Here’s a bit of music made using assistive technology to cheer you up. It was sent to me by my old mate and colleague Amanda - the best usability consultant and website project manager that I’ve ever worked with.

What’s this got to do with local democracy? Well, I’ve worked with a large number of local authorities / voluntary sector / membership organisations that aim to promote a greater standard of inclusive policymaking / responsive communications / organisational interactivity.

A well designed set of interfaces is fairly critical to the success of projects like this. Un-useable interfaces … well … don’t get used.

If you are a non-techie, and you are going to work with techies on a web-project in this area, you have to understand the very basics about accessibility. It helps you to avoid the classic cause for IT project management failure: You tell the IT department what you want. They don’t understand you properly and give you something that they think will do, without disrupting their wider set of objectives. They are behaving rationally in doing this - it usually means that they get a slice of your budget to put towards their pet-project.

Even when they do understand what you want, it’s often not good enough…

Left to their own devices, they will give you something that they can deliver saying “I think this will just about do the job.”

For this reason, I’ve found that a discussion of web accessibility between the technical staff (who are often - unnecessarily - the gatekeepers on projects such as this) and the people who are doing the including / communicating / interacting is usually a very valuable way of getting everyone on the same page for the following reasons:

Firstly, it’s an area that techies find genuinely interesting - and it brings home the complexity of doing the job properly. And the reasons for taking accessibility seriously are legion.

Secondly, there’s the moral argument. Inclusivity is non-negotiable - especially in projects that are about consultation, participation and … er… inclusion.

Thirdly, there’s the legal one: Not meeting reasonable expectations of inclusion with a web interface will mean that your project may fall foul of the Disability Discrimination Act.

Fourthly (and this is the most important one for me - the previous two are a ‘given’), accessibility (or lack of it) reveals a lot about the project - stuff that has nothing to do with bureaucratic box-ticking or the moral questions of inclusion. It tells you about the professionalism of the techies involved. Accessible websites seperate style and content, so that information on one site can be syndicated to others. They work well on lots of different browsers and platforms - so you can often use them on your mobile phone. They are more future proof. The content can be moved to new systems more easily if a change of use is needed. If this is an issue that you don’t fully understand, don’t panic. It’s fairly straightforward, and either a bit of googling or a phone call to a professional who is selling accessibilty should clear it all up.

I could go on (and on and on) with the benefits. People that haven’t done this before don’t always understand why it matters, but anyone with a bit of expereince knows that it’s crucial.

There are ways of ticking some of these boxes without being accessible of course - but it’s not efficient. It’s like the old IT Project Manager joke (there PM jokes, believe me) about how an aeroplane could be built by strapping pigeons to a train. Any developer that can’t show a track record in this area, and agree to a payment-dependent post-project audit on it, will be planning to stiff you - the customer - from the very start of the project. For sure.

A good presentation on accessibilty and a review of the standard management guidance that is on offer tends to foreground a few issues that the ICT department may have been tempted to overlook. ICT managers have a strong understandable motive to act as gatekeepers, of course. It’s their budget, and they can often shut their internal customers up by knocking up something that is not-quite-good-enough using Sharepoint - which, as - any fule kno - is the intranet and website-building panacea that can give you…

• 50% of what you want for 40% of the cost of…
• giving you 80% of what you want.
• And 20% of the cost of giving you 100% of what you want

(Pause while you read that again)

But 100% is what you want, isn’t it? Nothing less should do - and you can usually have 100% affordably in these open source days. It’s a classic example of what economists call ‘the market for lemons’ - the value of good practice is driven down by the fact that the customers don’t know whether they are really getting it or not. Ask a Sharepoint advocating IT manager if it’s accessible - they will say yes. But it usually isn’t to any standard that would impress the aforementioned Amanda.

And here’s a tip for anyone who wants to remove those gatekeepers from the project - particularly if you know that they will not add much value anyway:

First some preparation:

1. Phone up AbilityNet or Bunnyfoot - two of the leading accessibilty and usability consultants. Or Amanda.
2. Ask them for an example of a horror story - where an organisation let the IT manager procure the solution only to find that it was so unfit for purpose that they had to start again from scratch
3. Write down the names of the organisations concerned

Say the following to your gatekeeper:

1. I have absolute confidence in your ability to procure and implement this project in a way that fully understands our needs.
2. I will leave the specification of this project to you on only one condition: That - once it’s built, we will hire an accessibility consultant to audit your specification methods, the accessibility and usability of the interfaces, and that you will fix the project to their satisfaction if they find any shortcomings. I’ll ask them to use the PAS78 guidance on this (don’t worry - you don’t need to read this - the threat should be enough).
3. Just so you know what this entails, why don’t you phone up the IT manager of (insert the organisations names that you’ve been given) and find out how it worked for them?

Then just sit back and wait for your gatekeeper to come and tell you that there are plenty of good solutions that can be implemented either using standard configurable open-source tools, or by external consultancies that have good references. Ones that really really don’t need an IT manager to get involved.

Oh yes - one other thing: Tell the consultants that you do choose that you’ll be asking a third-party accessibility expert to give their solution a once over. Just before the bill gets paid….

PS: Have a look at LASA’s knowledgebase for best-practice in the management of ICT projects - most of it’s fairly good and independent stuff. This article on low-budget site testing by Mel - an old colleague of mine is worth a look.