The design and accessibility of New Zealand government websites went backwards in some areas last year, according to a new report. Photo / 123RF
The design and accessibility of New Zealand government websites went backwards in some areas last year, according to a new report. Photo / 123RF
The design and accessibility of New Zealand government websites went backwards in some areas last year, according to a new report - while comparable sites across the Tasman made big gains.
The report also praised Australia’s myGov and Canada.ca for giving their citizens a single logon andsingle point of entry, making it easier to create a profile for personalised services, and navigate multiple government departments.
That’s a contrast to New Zealand, where major Crown agencies have their own logins and user profiles (like MyIRD and MyMSD), running in parallel with the RealMe push at creating a single online identity.
Overall ratings for NZ Government websites. Source: Global Government Digital Performance and Inclusion Benchmark report
The second annual Adobe Global Government Digital Performance and Inclusion Benchmark report saw Australia jump 9.6 points to 68.4 (out of 100) to move into second place, just behind the United Kingdom. Six countries’ websites were tested in September 2023 using scripts, 1200 users aged between 18 and 65, and various tools to rate performance and accessibility. The top-performing Australian state, New South Wales, bagged an overall rating of 72.9.
New Zealand increased its score slightly to 59.6 but was still below the global average of 64.2.
That’s in the context that more than 50 per cent of people use a mobile as their primary device to access government services (according to the Citizens Advice Bureau’s Campaign to Address Digital Exclusion petition and its submission to Parliament in March 2022).
The report said that 23 per cent of those who were “digitally excluded” - that is, often on slow internet connections - had interactions of 30 minutes or more to fill in online forms.
Overall ratings for NZ Government websites. Source: Global Government Digital Performance and Inclusion Benchmark report
“Findability and navigation of government is kind of like the number one issue that we’re seeing,” said Adobe Asia-Pacific practice director, digital strategy John Mackenney, who has assessed results from multiple countries.
“Where governments have brought together sort of single front doors and portals, they perform much higher in terms of customer experience. Trying to understand what different government departments do can be an infinite frustration.”
Mackenney added: “Using a digital identity in a way that takes into account the citizens preferences and gives them control and transparency, is where the world is going and that’s how we’re going to deliver better government services. I think the question Is always whether we can get to a signal single digital identifier in each country.”
Accessibility and readability
The Australian Government’s myGov portal and various other central and state government sites also scored highly for accessibility features such as easy options to set different type sizes, or switch between high or low contrast.
Some 80 web design firms are listed as approved providers for government work. They work to broad design, accessibility and inclusivity guidelines, but with some leeway if legacy data or systems are involved, or other factors.
The www.govt.nz site features in a section on “current accessibility barriers” that include:
Font size is set in pixels, preventing browser settings from changing the default text size;
Some of our documents are in PDF format without an accessible HTML version;
Some fields on our feedback form are not marked up correctly;
Some words in te reo Māori aren’t marked up correctly which mean screen readers may struggle with correct pronunciation.
And you don’t have to have a disability to get frustrated by elements of some government websites, such as the scanned, unsearchable documents uploaded to the Companies Office.
Mackenney said beyond being searchable and bookmarkable, documents today also had to be readable by AIs.
Speaking of which - highlighting which content is generated by AI will be a critical element for not just governments but all websites, Mackenney said.
“We’ve seen a lot of misinformation and disinformation whether it was the New Zealand election or the referendum in Australia, and this is a massive issue leading into the United States election cycle. There needs to be the ability to appropriately watermark content that’s been made by AI to try to build trust,” he said.
“We launched an initiative called the Content Authenticity Initiative in partnership with the New York Times and the pre-Elon [Musk] Twitter to ask how do we effectively put a nutrition label on content to understand what’s its provenance.
“How was it originated? What’s been done to manipulate that content? Who is validating that that is a true, um, piece of content? That applies to images, videos, and then also documents.” (You can try out the initiative’s efforts - still in beta - by dragging and dropping a file from your device onto its inspection tool here).
AI is no panacea, accessibility expert warns
Digital accessibility advocate Jonathan Mosen says that awareness of web accessibility issues was high across NZ’s state sector. But he also added that even small stumbles can cause major, time-consuming workarounds, and warned that some artificial intelligence tools aren’t the one-stop, quick-fix they claim.
“While I haven’t used every government website, as a totally blind person using a screen reader, I’ve found them to be in good shape overall,” the Workbridge chief executive told the Herald.
“[But] there are little oversights sometimes. For example, recently I was assisting my wife to complete her passport application. Clearly a lot of care had been taken to make the process accessible, but it only takes one suboptimal part to derail the entire process.
“In this case, it was the tool that is supposed to automatically complete your physical address for you. We live in Wellington, and our street has the same name as a street in Auckland, and it took all my advanced screen reading skills to ensure that the correct address was selected. This illustrates that real end-user testing is critical.”
Another concern: “I have seen one or two government sites that have deployed accessibility overlay technology”, Mosen said.
“This is extremely controversial tech in the accessibility community, because the companies producing it promise that if website owners just deploy a piece of code and pay a subscription, AI tools can render the site accessible.
In the US especially, the overlay technology is also marketed as a tool that immunises a business against lawsuits from disabled people, Mosen said.
“Many screen reader users believe that these tools are ineffective at best, and actually harmful at worst.
“AI improves all the time and perhaps this technology will add value in time, but I have seen no evidence that it is there yet. A blindness-run company has even released a Chrome extension that blocks this tech.”
Mosen would like a policy that says this technology is not to be used on any government website until this technology has been proven to be effective by end users.
“I would be very disappointed to see this technology deployed in New Zealand more widely, and the Government has a leadership role here in insisting that nothing beats properly coded and vetted sites that are accessible,” he said.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
