Yearly Archives: 2005

The Brazilian connection

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I had a very pleasant journey back to London in the company of Nicholas Wood-Dow who was at the conference to promote open source software. We touched base on a few topics including Brazil and the connection between the Brazilian ambassador’s wife Lucia Flecha da Lima and Princess Diana, open source software of course (the best example in the public sector being its use by the German Government), and even the Cambridge connection (him Cath’s & me Christ’s). I mentioned I had worked briefly for Linux User magazine (which also included contributions from Dr Douglas Carnall), and said I thought an article on how NASA has used GNU/Linux could motivate key policy makers who love shuttles and space stations and all the rest.

Nick also mentioned the fact that another Nick – Nicholas Negroponte – chairman and founder of the MIT Media Labs, has produced a sub-$100 PC  to run on Linux  and as I found out is aimed at children in Brazil, as well as China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa. It was launched at the the World Summit on the Information Society earlier in November.

eAccessibility’s 70% failure rate

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The last session titled ‘No Citizen Left Behind’ focused on the complex issues of exclusion from e-services, a feature of all EU states. Kevin Cullen, of the Work Research Centre, summarised the usual solutions to bridge the digital divide from possible policy measures like universal service through to targeting excluded groups (indeed there is a service for older web users in my local inner city community centre which maybe I should take a look at).

On the important issue of accessibility Barry McMullin of  Dublin City University launched the eAccessibility of public sector services in the European Union report. A long title for a study which found that 70% of the 436 sites (around 305 sites) surveyed failed to meet the basic Level ‘A’ standard. Not surprisingly it also found that there was a significant correlation between states with strong policies supporting website accessibility and accessibility of those sites. I was hoping the worst offending EU websites would be revealed by Barry but of course for the purposes of the study this information was anonomised. However, Barry did tell me that the detailed data has been provided in confidence to each of the members states so they can locally do whatever further they think is appropriate. So look out public sector web managers if your’s is one of the 70%!