Dear Governor Owens,
Across Colorado government, technology practices concern me. They hurt our economy while creating artificial barriers between Colorado citizens and Colorado government agencies. Also these practices raise cost to taxpayers and invariably benefit a single, out-of-state vendor.
Since its inception in 1994, universal Web standards gave incredible popularity to the World Wide Web, but proprietary methods used by the State limit its usefulness. The State's de facto single-vendor requirements, primarily for Microsoft Internet Explorer, denies access to broad classes of people. These classes include people who cannot use the required software because they are using a popular, non-Microsoft operating system (such as Mac or Linux) or a mobile device (such as a cell phone or PDA); people who avoid the required software because of serious, occasional security issues; and people with physical disabilities.
Please see the appendix for list of problems found on Colorado government Web sites from a casual survey. The problems vary from cosmetic to complete loss of function.
To put this problem in perspective, it seems analogous to me to saying, "There are too few handicap people to accomodate them with wheelchair accessible bathrooms," or saying, "I'm sorry, but this court's parking lot is designed only for brand X automobile. Others please use the bus."
I suggest the State government quickly adopt laws or policies that persue universal technology standards to give citizens freedom and equal access to e-government.
In the long run, the State will both serve its citizens better, encourage economic competition, and likely save money on Web site maintenance.
Please see the appendix for a list of technical recommendations.
The most general and important recommendation is that Colorado persues a standards-based, vendor-neutral policy for e-government.
If you are interested in promoting technology standards, I hope you find this site useful too. Most of these ideas apply outside of Colorado and outside of the United States.
This Web site is a sort of working research project to determine how inaccessible government Web sites are and what is best to do about it. You are welcome to help. Steps left to do are:
In a large government with many departments, agencies, counties, cities, universities, etc., writing each site's maintainer is not a sustainable solution. If the maintainer leaves, the next person may start writing a proprietary Web site. Therefore, it is best to have a top-down approach such as a state-wide law, policy, or guideline.
See Colorado problems. This is a OpenOffice.org HTML file with footnotes suitable for sending a letter to the Governor.
There is an interesting tool called Mozilla Reporter. It would be good for this project to accomodate growth, but there are two issues. First, it would help to have fields for the relavent state, county, and city to which the Web site belongs. With this, you could search for one location and it would include all the subordinate locations (e.g. county is subordinate to state). Maybe fields for education and employment would help: it's very bad if a Web site accessibility issue prevents a person from getting a job or an education. Second, the tool would need to handle notes for non-Gecko browsers such as Konqueror and Opera.
I don't suggest using Mozilla Reporter for government sites because it advocates a bottom-up approach (see above).
If you would like to do research, see Colorado government Web sites.
If you would like to do research, see research tips.
Write Andrew. I welcome your additions to this Web site.