On person asked if the Government needed to impose the Federal Government’s laws regarding content publishing standards to consituents submission formats.

The short answer to the question is a resounding no.  There is a simple answer as well which is Business Transformation, rather than impose a law on constituents the documents should be transformed during the submission process, some Federal and State Government departments already have the technology in place to do this.  The issue is they have not yet identified the business need to write the business process to do this. It really is quite simple for those departments to implement an automated process which takes all the words and formatting from the submissions and converts them to all of the required formats with full accessibility applied, and all without any need for physical human interaction.

There is a $100,000 prize pool and at first glance the model looks similar to the Government 2.0 Taskforce. Although the Government 2.0 Taskforce model is not limited to a prize based model.

Well done NSW Government, Premiere Rees and #nswsphere.

-quote from media release-

“IT will be the principal means to deliver the economic and productivity growth needed to drive innovation across the entire economy,“ Senator Carr said.

“IT is critical to Australia’s directly employing more than 400,000 Australians.

“Council members have been drawn from across the IT spectrum and include representatives of industry, suppliers, users, education, research, government and unions.

“The breadth and depth of experience on offer in the council will ensure that it delivers on its objective to champion innovation through the use of IT.”

The Government’s National Broadband Network will be vital to delivering this smart technology.

Council Chair, Mr John Grant, Managing Director of Data#3 Pty Ltd said the Council would develop a strategic agenda.

“The Council will have a wide agenda to consider innovation within the IT industry itself plus the application of technology to create innovation across the broader economy. It will apply the Government’s published innovation framework as it works closely with all stakeholders to execute this agenda,” Mr Grant said.

“The IT sector has its own well earned reputation for having an innovative and entrepreneurial culture. Harnessing that talent for the greater benefit of Australian industry will be one of the Council’s greatest opportunities.”

-end quote-

I think this is absolutely brilliant and look forward in particular to the last statement being utilised.  To date federal government have gone with a “what we know is safe” approach and have been afraid of innovation.  I applaud this step in the right direction and harbour great hopes that innovation and change in IT in goverment become a reality.

On a side note the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research might start with a revamp of their existing web site to make it accessible.  It is not accessible in its current form it generates 179 warnings on the homepage alone when an accessibility tool is used on it.

Even in my house this isn’t good enough, I am using a Dell running Vista, yay! I can lodge my tax return using the very convenient eTax application, but my 16 year old daughter who has a part-time job at Boost Juice cannot because she is using a MacBook Pro.

Something needs to be done about this, and it needs to be done right now and made available to the public in the next couple of months.  The lodgement date should be extended for people who are effected by this accessibility issue.

This really is something that should also be under HREOCs jurisdiction as it is a basic Human Right to run whatever operating system you choose to run.

“Although there has been some progress in making it possible for people who are blind or vision-impaired to use online PDF forms, this option is considered inaccessible for most users. It is often possible to design online forms using non-PDF techniques. See, for example, http://www.mandoforms.com, which provides guides and tools for making online forms accessible.”

This information is incorrect, PDF documents and forms can be completely accessible and PDF is and has been for quite some time an ISO Standard.

Adobe are constantly actively participating with Standards groups to improve and enhance the platform and provide extensive up to date information regarding creating accessible PDFs.

The information contained in the Web Publishing Guidelines published by AGIMO are out of date and do not include accessibility information for Flex Applications or the Flash Platform.  AGIMO are currently running a Focus Group discussing the rewriting of these Guidelines and need to pay particular attention to the Accessibility Guidelines, to allay any further misconceptions regarding accessibility and the PDF and Flash Platforms.  Both Platforms are open source.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Adobe, I do run the ACT Adobe Products User Group for which I do not get paid, this is a Community group and not a Vendor group, many people other than myself donate their time to this group.  I have worked with Adobe Partner companies in the past and did own my own Macromedia Premiere Partner company until 2002.

It should be noted that the above AGIMO links are to archived content and not the current Web Publishing Guidelines.  The reason this post has been made is because Agencies are still using this outdated content which is quite often republished in their Corporate CMS and used by web content publishing teams as the most current information.

It should also be noted that the most current Web Publishing Guide does not address the above types of content, namely PDF and Flash Platform content.  These types of content are addressed by HREOC and the information given by HREOC clearly states that ideally web content should be made available in at least three formats, being HTML, PDF and RTF.

***UPDATE*** Thursday 6 August, 2009
Adobe’s latest accessibility guidelines can be found here.