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Following is a question by the Hon Frederick Fung and a written reply by the Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development, Mr Frederick Ma, in the Legislative Council today (June 11):
Question:
Regarding web sites set up by government departments and related organisations which use domain names ending with ".gov.hk", will the Government inform this Council:
(a) of the web sites which have not yet met the requirements of priority levels 1 and 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 formulated by the World Wide Web Consortium;
(b) of the web sites which do not support or fully support open source browsers such as Firefox, thus rendering people using open source browsers unable to access all contents;
(c) of the web sites which only provide documents in non-open standard formats (e.g. MS Word) for downloading by the public, thus rendering those who lack the means to buy the expensive software concerned unable to use these documents;
(d) of the web sites the web pages of which do not have text only version or cannot be displayed in linear format, thus causing a barrier to the visually impaired in browsing their contents; and
(e) whether it will request the relevant government departments and related organisations to improve the design of their web sites so as to ameliorate the situations mentioned in (a) to (d) above; if so, of the implementation timetable?
Reply:
Madam President,
As of May 2008, there are 392 web sites which use domain names ending with ".gov.hk". Out of these, 218 are hosted under the Government's Central Internet Gateway while the others are administrated individually by the respective bureaux/departments. Of the 218 centrally hosted web sites, they already account for over 733,000 web pages of contents and more than 173,000 downloadable documents available for public access. Given the design and content of those web pages and downloadable documents are being continually revised and updated by the respective bureaux/departments in line with their business needs and services delivered to general public, we do not maintain a master list on the detailed design and content of all the web sites and services having domain names ending with ".gov.hk".
On the other hand, the Government has established extensive internal guidelines ("Guidelines for Dissemination of Information through Government Homepages") on best practices in the design of web pages and electronic services, with reference to international practices and inputs from the industry and community groups on people with disabilities. All government bureaux/departments have revamped their web sites to comply with the web accessibility standards as published in the guidelines since 2003. In addition, all Government web sites are also regularly monitored to ensure that they comply with the web accessibility standards set out in the guidelines.
Regarding the questions raised by the Hon Frederick Fung, my reply is as follows:
(a) All web sites with ".gov.hk" domain names have been regularly monitored and verified their compliance with the web accessibility standards as defined in the above mentioned government internal guidelines. The guidelines covers all the requirements in priority I and priority II levels as set out by World Wide Web Consortium in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 that are relevant for adoption by government web sites. The minor differences are those involving old technologies that are seldom adopted or where there exists an alternative approach to addressing the concerned web accessibility issues.
(b) According to a recent survey conducted with webmasters of web sites with ".gov.hk" domain names, they confirmed that all ".gov.hk" web sites under their purview can be viewed with different open source browsers (such as Firefox) except two (Note 1). The concerned webmasters have been requested to consider making the necessary enhancements in this regard.
(c) Our internal guidelines as mentioned above suggest portable document format (.pdf files) file as the preferred option for documents posted in Government web sites for public downloading, in view of its advantages in accessibility over other formats. For example, PDF document reader can be freely available on the Internet.
In the same survey mentioned in (b) above, it is found that a very small number of the documents for public downloading are adopting proprietary format documents. The rationale for this is mainly in response to user requests. For example, target users may prefer certain kinds of document formats to facilitate form filling and/or further data analysis. While these documents are provided in proprietary formats, it is pertinent to note that these documents can also readily be opened and edited by using open source software that is freely available on the Internet.
(d) Our internal guidelines advise that two different approaches can be adopted by bureaux/departments to achieve web accessibility. One approach is to implement accessibility design features, such as providing text-equivalent for multimedia contents, in the graphic version. Another approach is to provide an alternative text-only version in addition to the graphic version. Both approaches follow international web accessibility practices in enabling the visually impaired to access the contents in the web pages, and are respectively adopted in all the web sites with ".gov.hk" domain names, with due regard to their different content and service design requirements.
(e) An inter-departmental committee is responsible for regularly reviewing the internal guidelines for dissemination of government information on the Internet. The latest version of the guidelines was released in early 2008. The committee will continue to keep abreast of the latest web accessibility related international developments and inputs from industry and user groups with a view to keeping the guidelines up-to-date and functional.
Note 1: The two websites are -
http://www.cervicalscreening.gov.hk/tc_chi/csis/csis_what.php
http://www.toothclub.gov.hk/chi/home_07.htm
Ends/Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Issued at HKT 14:57
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