The COI have established, via a report entitled "Naming and registering websites"originally issued in July 2007 by Alex Butler, some ground rules for Government departments that create and maintain websites. Along with the rules about who can have a .gov.uk domain are some very interesting guidelines about quality. BUT what makes this really interesting is that these guidelines have been given some teeth. A deadline of the end of December 2008 has been set for .gov.uk sites to meet these guidelines otherwise the right to use .gov.uk may be withdrawn from the organisation for the offending site.
So what do these guidelines cover. You can take a look at the report at http://coi.gov.uk/guidance.php?page=191
The sections that cover the quality of a website are dotted around paragraphs 77 through 91. The bit that covers the circumstances where withdrawal would occur is
- Non-conformance with any of the above principles and practice of the rules and conditions. (you need to look at the report for more on these)
- Persistent failure to maintain an accessible and functional website. For example, obsolete and de-commissioned domains - where there is persistent delivery of, for example, a code 404 page.
- Persistent failure to meet the minimum technical standards for government websites, including accessibility and coding standards.
- Failure to renew the name.
- Change of status of the organisation or project that the domain name represents or change of status of the domain name owner. If you inform us at naming@coi.gsi.gov.uk a suitable time scale for withdrawal can be negotiated
From a Sitemorse viewpoint these seem very positive. It's just a shame they can't impose these Standards and quality tests to other sectors. As it happens the Government sector comes out way ahead of other sectors in our surveys (http://survey-beta.sitemorse.com/survey/) on all counts - functionality, standards compliance and accessibility.
How much benefit might the retail sector gain if they were under threat of having their domain name removed ? I've discussed the role of carrots and sticks in encouraging website owners to smarten up their acts with particular reference to the DRC and accessibility. Unless there is a tangible, negative consequence if people do nothing then that's exactly what they'll do. We're all busy with an endless list of priorities. Something needs to raise website quality, compliance and accessibility up those lists.
Once again a Government initiative will improve things in the public sector. Shame about the commercial sector. But then any initiatives on this front would raise outcries regarding increasing red tape, the nanny state, competitiveness in a global economy. These feel like excuses to me. Perhaps we could have a quality Kite Mark - perhaps there already is such a thing but sites can match up to the standard so we never see it. Either way watch out for Central and Local Gov. surveys showing an ever widening gap from their commercial counterparts.
We sent an email to our local gov. contacts commenting on the COI initiative and discussing the possibility of a sites right to use .gov.uk being withdrawn and got the following reply:-
"In actual fact there has always been the possibility of a domain name being withdrawn due to inaccessibility, this document does not materially change the situation for .gov.uk sites but merely clarifies how this might be judged.
No .gov.uk domain has ever been withdrawn on this basis and it is extremely unlikely that it will happen in the future and certainly not for a small number of technical AA failures that your report highlights."
We seem to get under the skin of certain individuals in the Accessibility community (see my blog http://blog.sitemorse.com/2008/06/accessibility-consultants-vs-a.html ). My take on this is that there may have been a "possibility" of a domain being withdrawn BUT now there's actually a DEADLINE specified as to when sites should meet the COI standard and there is a pretty strong implication that the COI will want to know WHY a site hasn't met the standard once the deadline has passed. Of course it's unlikely that a site will loose it's .gov.uk domain. That's not the objective of the exercise. What the COI wants is higher quality more accessible sites and now has a stick to beat people with if they miss a deadline that was set last July.
And no we don't expect the COI to use the output from an automated testing tool to decide who to withdraw the domain from. However, we do expect that our service will be a useful benchmark for people as to how close they are to the COI's standards.
And it's not just Accessibilty that's identified in the COI document. Specific mention is made of broken links and non-compliant code. Which looking at the last report on the top 250 pages of the site of the person that responded to us suggests there's some work to do as the site has 12 broken links, 20% pages fail coding standards and 55% faill "AA"