Netco Government Guidelines Experience

A few years ago, the State Services Commission published rules to govern the coding of government Web sites.

These set standards, which government agencies must (in the case of departments & ministries) obey when they commission sites. The standards applied to all government sites from January 2006.

Although not compulsory outside government agencies, the rules are a common sense way of trying to make a Web site as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. The rules deal with such issues as cross-browser compatibility, allowing the visitor to set the text size or override the style sheets with his own, marking up HTML so text to speech readers can follow the content logically. There are many other small points that combine to allow almost anyone in any condition with any browser to view the site and make sense of it. This can't be a bad thing.

Some of the rules seem to us to be overly pedantic (navigation buttons must be in Māori and English but the site content doesn't have to be) but they add up to a logical way to approach a site build.

The guidelines also stress that content should be written in simple English. This will challenge departments that publish complex, technical reports as well as general content. The guidelines imply that Web content should be a simplified rewrite of printed content. This is fantastic for freelance writers but, we fear, the sheer volume of paper that issues from a modern government department will make this task impossible.

PDF file downloads are scorned in favour of HTML. This sounds good in practice: all documents should be able to be read on screen instead of downloading them as Adobe PDF files. So who's going to wade screen by screen through a 300 page, technical document? Most, like us, would surely prefer to download the PDF and print off a copy to be read at leisure and at considerably more ease.