The winners of the British Computer Society (BCS) Members of Parliament (MP) website awards were announced at a special event in the House of Commons on 7 November. The overall winner was Adam Price MP for Carmarthen East. The other awards went to: Paul Flynn MP - best design, Derek Wyatt MP - engagement and Alan Johnson MP for accessibility. (I have added links to all the relevant sites at the bottom of this blog).

The BCS set this competition up as part of the BCS 50th anniversary celebrations. The intent was to make parliamentarians more aware of the importance of ICT to the UK and in particular the work and influence of the BCS.
The competition also raised the awareness amongst MPs of the power of the web to promote their messages and agenda.

Speaking for the judging panel, Professor Nigel Shadbolt said that standards varied enormously. Some of the worst comments were: "Is he more interested in himself or his voters?", "Wouldn't vote for him.", "Which party does this woman belong to?" and "Self promoting as usual."

Professor Shadbolt added: "Of particular concern was the large number of MP websites that failed to be short-listed because they failed the accessibility test. This means that the large minority of the population with various disabilities would be unable to properly access these sites. And this last category, particularly with an ageing and increasingly IT reliant society, they ignore at their political peril."

"The best were able to combine excellent content with the newest forms of media, such as video and blogging in a bid to get up-to-date, relevant and well-written information out to a cross-section of their constituency."
Accessibility being my particular interest I have had a closer look at the three top sites in this category. I spoke to Abilitynet judge who said that there was a clear winner in this category.

Alan Johnson

The winner was Alan Johnson. The first thing to notice about this site is the simplicity and clear layout of the home page. It is very easy to see how to get from here to any details. The only sad thing is that the latest news at the time of the competition in November was from July.

The site is all built using XHTML Strict and the checks I run showed that it did conform, which shows that it is perfectly possible to abide by this level of quality. This is a good accessible site but I would still like to make some suggestions for improvement:

• The skip to main function is accessible to people using screen readers but is not visible to other people who may prefer to use the tab key rather than the mouse to navigate (including myself).
• The structure of the page is not really reflected in the header structure for example it would be really helpful if the navigation heading was a level two header so that screen reader users could access it easily by listing the headings.
• There is an accessibility page, which starts off with a good intent statement and then includes some technical detail of how this is done. It could be improved by adding links to some pages that describe how to use a browser such as the AbilityNet ‘myweb myway' page http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/myway/. The worse thing about the accessibility page is that it has a link to Silktide Sitescore with no explanation as to what it is or why it is on the page; when I clicked on it just times out!

Malcolm Bruce

Malcolm Bruce was one of the runners-up in this category. In comparison to the winner the home page really has too much content. I really cannot imagine how a screen user can make sense of the page, especially as the header structure only tell a quarter of the story.

Being able to contact the MP is obviously an important function of a web site but I do not think it should be the first link on every page. There is a perfectly good link to a contacts page in the navigation bar. Looking at the contact page brought up an issue around headers. Headers should be primarily a method of navigating around a page and not just a way of formatting text. On the contact page there are two level three headers one for ‘Rosemary Bruce' and one for ‘Diary Office' if you get a listing of headings you would expect these to be two different sections whereas they are one and the same person/function. Again this would be confusing to a screen reader user.

Malcolm's site includes a photo gallery. This is better than others I have seen because it includes more information and background stories to the pictures. It could be even better if there were headers for each picture so you quickly skip through them. I also think that the alt text is misused, it just repeats what is written directly under the picture so a screen reader user will just hear the same thing twice. I think there is a general principle to be learnt here, if the picture is described in detail in the surrounding text then the alt text should just say something like ‘ photo described in text'.

Adam Price

The final accessibility runner-up was Adam Price who also one the overall competition.

Having a Welsh constituency he has a specific accessibility issue that of language, so his home page is very simple with just a link to an English and a Welsh version of the site. As far as I can tell, my Welsh is not very good, all the pages on the site are translated and have the same site map, including the accessibility page. This does not go as far as the external sites for blogs and news. A closer look at the site could suggest ways other sites could support multiple languages.

The site is well laid with an easy to understand structure, with limited information on each page. It has plenty of links to useful external sites.

List of finalists

Design Award

Category Winner:

Paul Flynn MP http://www.paulflynnmp.co.uk/

Finalists:

Boris Johnson MP http://www.boris-johnson.com/

Mike Wood MP http://www.mikewood.org.uk/

Engagement Award

Category Winner:

Derek Wyatt MP http://www.derekwyatt.co.uk/default.aspx

Finalists:

Richard Spring MP http://www.richardspringmp.com/

Tom Brake MP http://www.tombrake.co.uk/

Accessibility Award

Category Winner:

Alan Johnson MP http://www.alanjohnson.org/

Finalists:

Malcolm Bruce MP http://www.malcolmbruce.org.uk/

Adam Price MP http://www.adamprice.org.uk/

Best MP Website Award 2007

Winner:

Adam Price MP http://www.adamprice.org.uk/

Finalists:

Lynne Featherstone MP http://www.lynnefeatherstone.org/

Richard Benyon MP http://www.richardbenyon.com/

Highly Commended MP Websites

Nadine Dorries MP http://www.dorries.org.uk/

Boris Johnson MP http://www.boris-johnson.com/

George Galloway MP http://www.georgegalloway.com/