How CFIT’s auditing and user testing helped welfare.ie win the eGovernment Accessibility award
"Our information is now more easily accessible and available to all our customers." – Peter Scully, Assistant Principal Officer, DSFA.
The Department of Social and Family Affairs wanted its welfare.ie website to achieve the highest level of accessibility. CFIT provided independent auditing and user tests involving people with disabilities. This helped the Department win the Accessibility category at the 2009 Irish eGovernment Awards.
The Problem
The challenge for public websites
Government policy and disability legislation commits public bodies to provide equal access for all, regardless of age or disability. Accessibility also makes financial sense. A fully accessible website allows an organisation to maximise the number of people accessing its services through the more cost-efficient online channel.
The needs of the Department in redeveloping welfare.ie
The welfare.ie website serves a very wide audience, providing information about income and other support services to parents, carers, employers, employees, immigrants, bereaved persons, older people, people with disabilities and others. The large amount of information includes many complex tables of benefit rates as well as online rate calculators and enquiry forms. All this has to be easy and efficient to navigate and use for all visitors.
The welfare.ie home page.
Why NCBI CFIT?
When the Department approached CFIT, they had already paid a lot of attention to accessibility in the redevelopment process. The specification called for a website that is usable by the widest possible audience, easy to navigate for both new and expert users and which caters for those who rely on assistive technologies.
The Department was already aware of what CFIT could bring to the project, from work on the accessibility of their internal client management and benefit tracking system. That had demonstrated the value of combining expert accessibility auditing with user testing, not only for identifying problems and solutions but also for giving the Department's staff a real insight into the practical experiences of users with disabilities and the issues they face when navigating an information-rich website.
The Solution
What we did
A full in-depth audit against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) identified the areas where the site was already highly accessible as well as those where it fell short of meeting the guidelines. User tests involving people with disabilities explored the site's usability and its compatibility with assistive technologies. Staff from the Department's Internet Unit were able to observe all the user tests remotely in CFIT's purpose-built user testing facility.
Use of the remote observation room in the CFIT user testing facility (DSFA staff not shown).
Problems revealed, insights gained
The audit uncovered problems with the coding of forms, data tables and structural elements which would make the site difficult to navigate and the information difficult to extract for disabled users. The user tests confirmed the extent of these problems and revealed further issues such as the design of the online rate calculators causing users to make input errors and misinterpret the results. All these problems were fixable and CFIT's consultants were able to recommended appropriate remedial work.
"The user testing highlighted things we couldn't possibly have thought of in the development process." – Fiona McManus, DSFA
The work resulted in a prioritised list of issues and recommended solutions, illustrated by screenshots, code segments and video clips from the user tests. This provided a compelling illustration of the misunderstandings, confusions and frustrations experienced by typical users and the changes that would prevent these occurring in future.
Having observed the user tests, the Department's staff had developed significant insights into the needs and experiences of users. This helped to demystify accessibility, enabling them to work with their developers to effectively implement the changes.
The effectiveness of the Department’s approach to ensuring the accessibility of welfare.ie was publicly recognised at the 2009 Irish eGovernment Awards, with the presentation of the Accessibility category award.
"The welfare.ie site was chosen because the Department followed a user-centred design process, engaging with people with disabilities and testing it with real users. This helped refine the design and will inform improvements to the website in future iterations." – Dónal Rice, Centre for Excellence in Universal Design, member of the 2009 Irish eGovernment Awards judging panel.
Daragh O'Connor of the DSFA, receiving the eGovernment Accessibility award from Minister Mary Hanafin and Dónal Rice from the Centre for Excellence in Universal Design.