Internet Newsletter for Lawyers |
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Associated with this is "The web standards project" (see www.webstandards.org.uk) which is a joint venture between London Advice Services Alliance and the Community Legal Service (CLS), which run the Just Ask! Site. The two aims of the project is to make it easier for the public to find the legal information they need and make information more accessible to visually impaired people.
Sites that achieve the quality mark will meet conformance Level A of the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines. This standard is recommended by the RNIB and has been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium founded by Tim Berners Lee who invented the web. To achieve this quality mark sites must have adequate Meta tags and descriptions in place and each page must be classified under The Content Classification Scheme, which has 14 main categories ranging from benefits to Police and Crime.
The idea of this classification scheme, along with it's own Thesaurus is to uniform search terms, so for e.g. the term 'work' would bring the same results as the search term 'employment', thus making it easier for a user to find what they are looking for without having to know any legal jargon or know the correct terminology.
To find out if your site is compliant is fairly straightforward and can be done by downloading a programme called the 'Bobby Test' which, can be found at www.cast.org/bobby This test will not only tell you if your site has passed but will also show the areas of the site which have failed, enabling the user to make the necessary changes.
Although making the necessary changes to a web site are fairly minimal aside from the 'Metadata and Content Classification Scheme' there are other requirements such as 'Definition of Service', 'Equality of Access' and 'Accuracy of Information', which of course if implemented will incur a cost to firms which do not have in house web design expertise.
For those firms and organisations that receive a lot of traffic from the Just Ask! Web site this has been taken very seriously and we understand that the several workshops that the project ran where well attended. For firms of solicitors not associated with the CLS or Just Ask!, the introduction of the quality mark for web sites does not seem to have generated much interest, possibly because the project is still in its infancy and very little is known about the project in general.
In summary, this is a good idea that requires greater awareness in both the legal and public sectors.
Adrian Miles is Marketing Director of Interactive Law, a company owned by Matrix New Media Ltd and providing a series of consumer-oriented web sites. Email adrian@matrixnewmedia.net.
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