Last summer my main office PC expired, and I had to get hold of a new one in a hurry. I plumped for a Dell - their service was exemplary and the PC itself is a nice piece of kit at a very reasonable price. But like a new girlfriend with an STD it had a dirty little secret that only started to bite once it had inveigled itself into my daily routine. That dirty little secret was Vista.

Vista has plagued my working day for the past 6 months, and my productivity has suffered. I've soldiered manfully on thinking that I could learn to overcome or work around the barriers Vista put in the way of my work, and loathe to write off the expenditure.

I was wrong. I know this subject has been done to death, but I cannot fathom how Microsoft can invest the time, money and effort they have into an nth generation operating system and produce something that is so god-damned awful to use productively. It. Sucks. Hard. I could install XP on it, but that's not a sustainable strategy.

So I'm joining the ranks of Apple Mac users, for lots of reasons not least that it will be a joy to be able to work with a Unix-based desktop OS, and to have my development platform of choice availble natively on the move. Add in no more UAC, TextMate and the beautiful display and I'm wondering why it's taken me so long to see the light.

Must say big thanks to Ann for helping me decide what exactly I needed. I'm off to order my MacBook Pro now, having resisted the temptation to head into Glasgow tomorrow to visit the Apple Store in person.

Like last year's event it's got a great line-up of speakers and a theme which is refreshing and just a little bit different:

In the world or modern web development we can no longer consider the browser as the end point of our product which is our content. More and more devices and applications are being released that can access our information and more importantly do not even require a browser to do so.

For The Highland Fling 2008 we're bringing into focus how the landscape is changing. API's, desktop apps, ambient devices, mobile and much more are helping us break out of the browser and potentially reaching an entire new audience as a result.

How do we embrace this, how do we take our existing skill set and transpose it into new mediums? How do we expand our skill set? What is our skill set going to be? Where is it all going?

There are still tickets left (at only 125 quid, a veritable bargain) so if you're anywhere near Edinburgh or an airport you owe it to yourself to attend.

Planning started in earnest a few weeks ago, and we're having a lot of fun with it. Development is now underway, and we hope to have a launch in the early summer. Before then there will be a lot of internal testing to be done - we'll be looking for testers in a month or two.

I'm not going to go into too much detail about what the site will offer. Let's just say we're trying to create an environment where betting can be a fun, safe and free activity for anyone.

If this has piqued your interest you can register over at the betMooch site, have a read of the blog, or track our activity on Twitter.

When the Cabinet Office's Customer Service Excellence website appeared last week I had a dig around, wasn't very impressed by what I saw and left it at that. But since then there's been a nagging voice at the back of my mind, urging me to think a little harder about this.

This bit of the site I found particularly hard to swallow:

The Government wants public services for all that are efficient, effective, excellent, equitable and empowering - with the citizen always and everywhere at the heart of public service provision.

So, let's consider the evidence and you can help me decide whether the Cabinet Office deserve to be hauled over the coals for the CSE website.

Firstly this is the same Cabinet Office that last year issued a consultation document, Delivering Inclusive Websites, which suggested that any government website that failed to conform to WCAG level AA by December 2008 could have its domain withdrawn, and that all new government websites should conform on launch.

So, as you'd expect, being brand spanking new the CSE website states proudly on its accessibility page:

In general, the site conforms to WAI double AA rating where HTML is used. Where documents are made available in other formats, conformance has not been achieved.

I think it's reasonable to have some documents in other formats which don't conform, so we'll overlook that.

Sadly, as you may have guessed, the rest of the site falls some way short of level AA conformance, and indeed some way short of level A conformance. I spent 15 minutes testing a few of the pages and found enough to satisfy me it was a bit short of the required standard. For example the home page features not a single HTML heading and lots of pictures of text without alt attributes. There are lots of other failings but the developers clearly need an accessibility 101 refresher.

The site isn't very good, and when you consider that:

• this is a government website produced in 2008
• for the government's new Customer Service Excellence standard
• by the department responsible for setting standards for government websites
• which is recommending that new government websites conform to WCAG level AA
• and which in 2006 contributed to the BSI's PAS 78, Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites
• and the site has serious accessibilty failings

…you can probably understand why I've come out of retirement.

I've made enquiries to the FOI team at the Cabinet Office. If you're tempted to do the same please don't - we had problems with the DTI dodging difficult questions because too many people were interested, it would be a shame if that were to happen again.

This will be the last SPiN conference since the organisation is winding down this year. I've worked in and around UK government for over 14 years now, mostly in information roles, and SPiN have been a constant through that time. It is testament to their awareness that the decision to wind down has been taken now, and absolutely fantastic that they are actively seeking to promote new organisations like the PSWMG and SOCITM who can continue to represent the interests of SPiN members.

Looks like a fine line-up, you can register at the SOCITM website.

So if you read, speak Italian and like books, please sign up for the Leggili newsletter.

It's been a busy time lately, this is some of what I've been up to:

• Consultancy for turn2us, a new charity which soft launched in October
• Consultancy for CC Africa, a fantastic South African company who have the most fantastic luxury safari lodges in Africa and India. We were fortunate enough to stay for a couple of nights at Madikwe to experience it for ourselves, and it was absolutely stunning. We were lucky (?) enough to be charged by an elephant too.
• Working with London Councils on their project to select a new CMS (the impressive Tagish) and totally revamp their web presence. Really looking forward to this coming to fruition in the new year.
• Lots of work with councils, colleges, schools and small businesses.
• Registering lots of domains for in-company projects which I need to find time to start!

One of the things I haven't been doing is keeping up to date with the blogs I used to read regularly - it's amazing how isolated that has made me feel at times. So I've pruned by Bloglines to under 50 feeds and set aside 10 minutes every morning to check out what's happening in the world.

Now the business is running smoothly and all the tedious but important admin stuff is taking less time I hope to post more often (well, at least more often than every 2 months).

To kick off I've got a series of posts about forms lined up, inspired by my experience on the South African Airlines website...

I have a question about the conditions of use for .gov.uk names, which appear on the Cabinet Office at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/government_it/web_guidelines/domain_names.aspx

These conditions state in section 4 that websites which do not comply with current UK disability legislation will have their domain names withdrawn. Other circumstances when .gov.uk domain names may be withdrawn are also detailed.

Could you please tell me:

1. How many .gov.uk domains have been withdrawn during the lifetime of these conditions for failure to comply with disability legislation.
2. How many .gov.uk domains have been withdrawn for other reasons listed in the conditions.

To give a little more context, Section 4a of the conditions of use state:

The applications (Web, email, etc) using a .gov.uk domain name must comply with current UK legislation and support channels that provide accessibility for disabled people, members of ethnic minorities and those at risk of social/digital exclusion. Legislation includes Copyright, Data Protection Act and Disability Discrimination Act. Abuse of will result in the name being withdrawn.

Today I received this response from the COI:

Firstly, it is important to understand the legislative context and the guidance for compliance with it. In your letter you state in relation to the conditions of use of a .gov.uk domain name that, 'websites which do not comply with current UK disability legislation will have their domain names withdrawn.' This isn't the case for a number of reasons. Firstly, we are not just looking at whether a website complies with disability legislation, we are also looking at whether a website meets the minimum standards for accessibility. The guidelines state that websites should 'comply with the accessibility recommendation for public sector sites, that is, W3C WAI Level AA.'

Secondly, it should be stressed that disability legislation is in place to protect the rights of the individual, not to detail the specific requirements on websites (both within and outside the .gov.uk namespace). Even if websites meet the recommended minimum standard, this is no guarantee that the user experience for people with disabilities will be problem free. This fact was highlighted in the formal investigation carried out by the Disability Rights Commission and re-iterated in the 2005 survey of public service eAccessibility commissioned by the Cabinet Office.

Thirdly, the guidelines go on to say that, 'Failure to comply with this may result in the name being withdrawn.' This implies that websites will be considered for withdrawal if they fail to meet the minimum standard, not automatically withdrawn.

Having said that, the Government has been working with industry, academia and the third sector to build a robust approach to delivering inclusive websites. To ensure that government pays due regard to current disability legislation (the Public Sector Disability Equality Duty) and in order to meet European objectives for inclusive e-government (Riga Ministerial Declaration 2006), COI has updated Chapter 2.4 of the Guidelines for UK Government Websites and proposes that all government websites must meet Level Double-A of the W3C guidelines by December 2008. The updated guidance has recently been sent out for formal consultation and is attached for your information.

In answer to your question,

1. No website domain names have been withdrawn for failure to comply with disability legislation; and
2. No website domain names have been withdrawn for the other reasons set out in the conditions of use.

However, the government has taken a proactive approach to reducing the overall number of websites it owns and in the future we can expect to see increased focus on raising the standards for government websites, including inclusivity and accessibility. This is part of the Transformational Government Strategy to converge websites around audience channels including Directgov and BusinessLink. This will be reflected in the updated policy on naming and registering websites, which will go for formal consultation later this month.

The most telling part of the response for me is that the conditions of use for .gov.uk domains have never been enforced. Given that section 4a explicitly states that sites not complying with current legislation will have their name withdrawn, one can only conclude that the agency responsible for upholding the conditions considers every website ever to be published under a .gov.uk domain to be compliant with current UK legislation around accessibility. (Or am I being unduly harsh and literal?) More support for the view that the proposal in Delivering Inclusive Websites to use WCAG as a measure and domain withdrawal as a consequence is a waste of time and needs to be replaced with a more positive and realistic scheme?

Perhaps more revealing of the government's future strategy is the final paragraph, which refers to the reduction in the number of government websites and an increased focus on raising standards. It's likely that the recently issued consultation around web accessibility is a thinly disguised ploy to encourage as many .gov.uk sites as possible to move into the loving arms of DirectGov, or at least onto the technical platform it now shares with several other large, high profile departmental sites. If it happened it wouldn't be a bad thing.

Techshare

My presentation, "Influencing government web accessibility policy: advocacy vs. militancy", is now on the site and available to download with speaker notes:

• MS Powerpoint format (3.5Mb)
• Portable Document Format (PDF) (828Kb)

The main thrust of the document is that all existing UK government websites should be accessible to WCAG level AA by end December 2008, while all new sites should be conformant before being launched. The main difference between this policy target and the endless procession of missed targets we've seen over the past few years is the explicit threat of the withdrawal of the .gov.uk domain for sites which fail to meet the standard.

The COI (and the Cabinet Office before them) already have this power under the Code of Practice for .gov.uk domains (see Where are the gatekeepers, March 2006) but as far as I know have never exercised it. Whether the threat is real this time remains to be seen.

But it is only a consultation document at this stage, and it's a prime opportunity to lobby the government to adopt a robust stance over non-compliance. If anyone wants a copy of the document please email me and I'll be happy to pass it on.

Here's the text that accompanied the document:

The Central Office of Information (COI) would like to invite you provide feedback on the attached document, Delivering Inclusive Websites (TG102), by end of business November 13, 2007.

This guidance is an update of Chapter 2.4 of the Guidelines for UK Government Websites http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/webguidelines/

In order to meet European objectives for inclusive e-government and so that the UK public sector meets its obligations with regards to disability legislation, we have stipulated that all government websites must meet Level Double-A of the W3C guidelines by December 2008. Failure to satisfy this requirement will result in initiation of the process to withdraw the .gov.uk domain name used by the website.

Government websites are strongly recommended to develop an accessibility policy to aid the planning and procurement of inclusive websites. This includes building a business case, analysing user needs, developing an accessibility test plan and procuring accessible content authoring tools. The guidance covers some of the design solutions to common problems faced by users but is mainly aimed at strategic managers and project managers to assist with planning and procurement.

Please send comments to webguidelines@coi.gsi.gov.uk

Afew weeks ago something happened that made me stop and question why I'm in business and whether I've got what it takes to succeed in business in the long run.

I'm doing some work as a technical advisor for a company, let's call them company A, that produces a piece of software that aids accessibility on the web. Everyone I've dealt with at the company is committed, friendly and knowledgable, and they have a great, successful product. It's the sort of company I hope Champion IS might become in time - always looking for ways to improve the user experience and focussed on their product and their clients.

So when their closest competitor (let's call them company X) started mailing company A's clients with aggressive and pernicious marketing, trashing company A's product with false claims and promoting their own product, I was appalled. It shouldn't have been entirely surprising - company X has a history of dodgy marketing, and has a poor reputation in certain circles - but the two companies are market leaders and have very little other opposition in their sector.

I don't want to go into any detail about the content of that marketing, or what company A will or should do in response, but instead want to consider what it says about company X and whether my reaction was a symptom of naivety. Here are some questions:

1. To be successful in business do you have to attack the opposition?
2. Is it naive to think that producing high quality work and maintaining high quality customer service are enough to survive if not thrive in business?
3. How would you respond if you were company A?

Feel free to guess the companies' identities, but don't expect me to validate them. :-)

Techshare site

There was a danger, I feared, that the paper I proposed might prove to be a bit contentious - "Government web accessibility policy - advocacy vs. militancy" - but fortunately the committee deemed it appropriate, so roll on 5th October.

The presentations are available to download from the Public Sector Forums site . Also worth a mention are Pat Lauke's photos of the event .

For those of you who attended here are links to some of the resources that were mentioned during the day's proceedings, if I've missed anything please let me know and I'll add them:

• User-defined accesskeys
• Expanded links for screenreader users (view source for details)
• CastingWords podcast transcription
• Browsercam and fundable to make it more affordable
• Colour contrast analyser Firefox extension at Juicy Studio

In a slight departure from the Birmingham event we set aside 30 minutes for exhibitor presentations, and an hour before lunch to discuss the possibility of forming a public sector web management group.

This latter idea has been met with a generally positive response, and a forum's been setup at pswmg.org.uk to facilitate discussions at this very early stage. If you're involved in the web in the UK public sector in any way at all please drop by, register and let us know what you think.

Early on in the development of Revish I had the idea that offering the option to listen to a review would be a nice feature to have. Even better if you could download an mp3 of reviews and listen to them at your leisure, maybe on the move. At some point in the future there will be a Revish podcast, hopefully with reviews read by the users who wrote them, but what I needed in the short term was a text to speech technical solution.

ReadSpeaker

Browsealoud

As an aside, out of curiousity I did download and install Browsealoud, but couldn't get it to work, even on the Browsealoud site. The software replaces your mouse pointer with a branded pointer, but it just displayed a red cross for me, and I couldn't get speech out of it whatever I did. This merely confirmed my decision to go with ReadSpeaker.

I contacted ReadSpeaker, explained my needs and they recommended ReadSpeaker SayIt, and even better for me offered a free licence in exchange for this review. How could I refuse?

Implementation

I duly received a welcome email, with my account details and comprehensive implementation instructions. Being a hosted solution the installation is all about determining the best approach for your site, then familiarising yourself with the many configuration options the service offers.

For Revish I opted for the ReadSpeaker Flash player, with a fallback of a straightforward text link to listen to a review should javascript not be available. This is one of the great things about the product - there are options to suit almost every technical situation, and you can use standard web development techniques to provide graded access to its functions based on the user's platform. So visitors to Revish with javascript and Flash (~85%) will get the full-fat Flash player, while the rest will get a text link which will be functional on just about any platform with a media player.

I'll also add an account option to allow registered users to choose the text link over the Flash player - on initial testing it isn't keyboard friendly.

There are some problems with the ReadSpeaker documentation - it presents a lot of configuration options, but doesn't make it clear how or where to implement them all. For example some can be set in your HTML to be processed by ReadSpeaker at runtime (for example elements to be ignored) while others require to be set by ReadSpeaker themselves at their servers (for example in my case I didn't want speech to start automatically when the page loaded, and with the Flash player I was unable to do this myself). While this is a little frustrating, the response from ReadSpeaker support was extremely quick, and consistently helpful and accurate.

Some of the technical examples have critical typos - for example a misplaced single quote resulted in me spending too much time working out why the vanilla Flash player example from the documentation wasn't working.

On a positive note ReadSpeaker have committed to improving the documentation, and correcting the errors I found. Another example of a great support ethos that seems to pervade the company.

Voice quality and features

Ultimately the most important factor in speech-enabling a website is the quality of the voice - if the service fails to produce clear, understandable output it's a complete loss.

I chose the female Scottish ReadSpeaker voice, not just because I live in Scotland and my company is based here, but because I find it easier on the ear than the standard female voice. This is a personal preference, and I'm not sufficiently familiar with the product yet to know if I will be able to offer visitors to Revish a choice of voices - it would be a nice touch. So I'm keen to hear what others think of the voice on Revish - understandable, or a bit Rab C ?

Given the immense complexity of the english language it's inevitable that there will be some words, phrases and constructs that any text to speech service will struggle with, and some misuses of punctuation that a reader will understand, but that cannot be interpreted by software. In ReadSpeaker's case I am extremely impressed with the way it copes with most things thrown at it on Revish - the issues I've seen so far are limited to the use by reviewers of characters like asterisks to indicate emphasis, and ReadSpeaker reading them literally as "asterisk", and some mis-pronunciation of words, for example "thyme" being spoken with a soft "th". Once again though the company are very happy to receive feedback on these sorts of issues, and commit to make adjustments to the software to correct them.

On the whole I'm very pleased with the all-round performance - speech starts within no more than a few seconds of clicking the "play" button, and the option to download the spoken review as an mp3 file is a nice feature.

Coming soon

At the moment I haven't implemented ReadSpeaker fully into Revish - it will be later this week, but in the meantime you can see and hear how it works by appending ?rs=1 to any review, for example:

http://www.revish.com/reviews/0753821532/reynard/?rs=1

Summary

A speech enabled website can help many people - those with low literacy skills, those with dyslexia, those with some visual impairments - and ReadSpeaker makes it incredibly easy for site owners like myself to offer that help. As with any emerging technology it's not perfect, and there is plenty of room for improvement. But 'm still blown away by the way it works: people from all over the world write book reviews at Revish, and this incredibly clever software translates the diverse writing styles and vocabularies used by them into speech, over the internet.

The highest recommendation I can give is to say that ReadSpeaker will be a permanent part of Revish. As I refine the Revish implementation and learn more about the possibilities I'll post information here.

If you're interested in learning more about ReadSpeaker or buying a licence please visit their website at http://www.readspeaker.com (and no, I'm not on commission).

The same cast of speakers - Bruce Lawson , Ann McMeekin , Pat Lauke , Grant Broome, Ian Lloyd and myself - will each present a 40 minute session, and sit as a panel for open questions. If Birmingham was anything to go by it should be another great day.

The event is being organised by my company, Champion IS, in association with Public Sector Forums. Despite their monicker, and unlike last time around, this event is open to all and sundry, not just public sector delegates.

Full details of the day are available on the CIS website , with online booking via the PSF site .