The NHS Direct website is not accessible enough for disabled users and
contains too many coding errors, whereas the new DH website has excellent
accessibility and speed, a recent survey of government websites has found.
The survey, carried out by SiteMorse on behalf of Business2WWW, found that
only 0.4% of the pages on www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk fully complied with the W3
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) basic checklist, the benchmark against
which all websites are measured for ease of access.
However, the DH website www.dh.gov.uk was judged the third best out of 67
popular government websites and scored 100% in basic accessibility against
the WAI checklist. Overall, the NHS Direct website was ranked 41/67.
Brian Aherne, speaking on behalf of Business2WWW, said that good design and
freedom from errors was crucial to ensuring everybody can read webpage
content. "An important part of accessibility is to ensure that the HTML on
your site is correct. Using HTML that adheres to W3 standards is the best
and easiest way to ensure that your site works properly in as wide a variety
of situations as possible."
The review checked pages for download speed and smooth execution of code as
well as compliance with the WAI checklist. In order to pass the test at the
basic level, sites must include text descriptions of images and transcripts
of any audio files, provide scalable text, and more besides.
A spokesperson from NHS Direct Online told E-Health Insider that work on the
website was ongoing. "We are currently undertaking a website redesign which
will be completed by early 2005. As part of this process, we are carrying
out work to improve our web accessibility and ensure that the new design
meets web accessibility standards."
Other government health sites tested include www.drugs.org.uk, which was
ranked 37/67 and had no pages accessible to disabled people. The Disability
Rights Commision website, www.drc-gb.org, was 100% accessible but fared
somewhat worse in performance, with a sore of 55/67.
A summary of the WAI checklist can be downloaded from
www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/full-checklist.html.
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