APSE: the (k)nave of clubs?
OK, so we didn’t win. But to be beaten in a category called ‘Innovation and IT in service delivery’ by something that is not by any stretch of the imagination innovative in an IT sense is a bit rich (and I’m sure the other genuinely innovative projects felt the same). And perhaps the site shouldn’t carry the Bobby AAA Approved logo when it doesn’t meet the AAA standard, and in any case has many other accessibility errors; use the Valid HTML logo when it fails validation; or use a design that breaks when the text size is increased (and the default used is very small) - and is badly broken on some pages in anything but IE even without that. Still, maybe it was because the hosts had entered every category and otherwise wouldn’t win anything…
However, that’s not the point here. What puzzles me more about the Association for Public Service Excellence awards is how they can possibly assess the winners in most of the categories which give awards to the Internal Service Team of the Year in a host of areas, such as Waste Management, Refuse & Street Cleaning, Roads/Highways Maintenance and Management or Building Cleaning. It can only be on the basis of their applications, since there is no way, for example, that they are going to send teams out to assess the state of the roads in Cornwall, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Northumbeland, Kensington & Chelsea, Torfaen and West Lothian (and they are just the ones on the short list). Our projects (and indeed most, if not all, of the IT projects) could be accessed and assessed online. As for the others it seems to me that it’s more about being able to talk a good game, since actual performance can’t in practice be measured.
The APSE web site, by the way, deserves an award itself for some of the most clueless web design I’ve seen a long career of sneering at how badly-constructed most public-sector websites are. I mean, for goodness sake, a center-aligned <div> containing a layout table consisting of two cells each containing an <iframe>. This really is bad design at its very poorest, combining all the worst aspects of frames, javascript and inaccessible design. And yes, they do commit all the classic accessible-design no-nos: text sized in pixels so IE users with poor eyesight (or very high resolution screens) can’t resize it; links that are’t links just to trigger a javascript-driven menu system (yes, you can’t navigate the site without javascript); and of course the concomitant links that are links, but don’t look like links; 220-odd lines of javascript included in the document, within cargo-culting HTML comments (nested 60 levels deep! - here’s a hint guys - that hasn’t been necessary since about 1997, if indeed it ever really was); I can report that Spacer Gif is alive and indeed thriving, and that browsers will display a nasty mix if HTML3.2 and 4.01 code, even if they have to guess what the authors meant; a ‘bookmark this site’ that only works in IE (and wonderfully the very idea of which assumes that visitors don’t know how their own browser works <sigh>); incorrectly-nested headings (ie they’ve been used to size text, not for their structural meaning); links opening in unannounced new windows; and you’ve got to love the idea of <p class=”normal”>. Not exactly leading the way in excellence methinks.