Over the last few entries, I’ve looked at some of the websites used by county councils to provide details of the 2008 local elections. Some of these websites (mainly Monmouthshire County Council) were just plain irritating, whereas others were really easy to use, but didn’t provide enough information (Swansea). Cardiff’s site was somewhere in between.

Overall though, none of these sites provided the level of detail and usability required for the age of the Internet. It is becoming less and less acceptable for councils to avoid providing this information online.

It is, however, encouraging to note that the 3 councils I have covered actually provided live information online. A number of councils I looked at during election night did not provide information at all (for example Neath Port Talbot and Torfaen. What is even worse – and completely unacceptable – is Powys County Council, who still did not have results of their elections available 4 days after the election took place!

The next set of council elections in Wales take place in 2012, I sincerely hope that by then, every council gets its act together and produces live systems that not only comply with the UK’s accessibility laws, but are also easy to use and provide the level of detail expected.

Will this happen? I don’t know – we will have to wait and see.

MCC made use of a piece of software by Associated Knowledge Systems Ltd to show the results from each ward. The website acts like a PowerPoint presentation with a slide for each ward, automatically cycling between them. This of course is not really appropriate for the web – if you missed your ward, or didn’t finish reading the slide before it moved on, you had to wait for the site to cycle through all the others – taking anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes.

Although this was particularly annoying (my ward was located towards the end of the list) – not helped by the fact that the website regularly crashes and forces you to start again at ‘A’ – the slides provided a good level of detail. The slides allowed you to see a list of candidates, their political party, number of votes (with percentage) and which one was finally elected. In addition to this were the number of registered voters in the ward, number of ballot papers, spoilt papers, turnout and winning majority.

This was further helped by the use of a number of graphs showing some of these figures.

I have no problem with Monmouthshire using a system like this for someone who just wants to see every ward – or even to display results in the counting rooms, but why did they not make links available to jump to an individual ward? This would make it much easier for other users who don’t want to wait around 20 minutes just because their ward happens to be at the end of the alphabet! I suspect that this is a limitation of the software they purchased and something they should have considered.

The annoyance factor of having to wait for your ward to be displayed is nothing compared to the fact that the website was inaccessible to disabled users. Any points the site recovers are quickly lost when you start to look at accessibility. To start with, the site was displayed in frames – a very common problem for screen-readers for those with poor (or non-existent) eyesight. Further accessibility problems could have been caused by incomplete captions on tables, and the use of tables for the design of the site – a big no in the age of CSS and style sheets.

I find it hard to believe that Monmouthshire County Council is still refusing to produce accessible websites even though it is a legal requirement in the UK.

Rating:
Ease of use: 0/5 – There is no reason for making users wait 20 minutes to see information about their ward
Level of detail: 4/5 – Good level of information about each ward and good use of graphs
Accessibility: 1/5 – An attempt was obviously made to include captions and summaries of tables, but the use of frames, tables for design, inline CSS styling, and incomplete captions let it down badly

Overall: 5/15

Next time, I’ll look at the election website for Swansea City Council.

Traditionally, I would use the BBC News website to track this information, but, they only provide information at full council level and do not delve into individual wards. If they did the amount of data they would have to handle would be astronomical. Just to give a rough figure, 8423 positions were up for election (source: BBC News), if you take into account that the majority of these were contested, you can see how this would be impossible to manage.

To find out the information I was after, I had to rely on local council’s own websites to provide me with the detail I required. My biggest discovery (somewhat unsurprisingly) was that in general, these websites are crap. They are difficult to understand, take forever to load, provide little accessibility and did not give me the level of information I needed.

So what are they doing wrong? Over the next few blogs I am going to look a number of councils that had live election websites – Monmouthshire County Council, Swansea City Council and Cardiff County Council.

You can keep track of the whole series of entries here.