Irish Election are pleased to announce our collection of Irish 
E-Government
Read more about: Government
As I am not a journalist, my contact with the political parties and government is all done via the Internet. Thus this survey by Red Cardinal comes as no surprise.
Government Department sites:
25% Failed the minimum standard for accessibility,
75% Failed both minimum accessibility and basic coding standards.
Public body sites:
33% Failed the minimum standard for accessibility,
100% Failed both minimum accessibility and basic coding standards.
Political Party sites:
57% Failed the minimum standard for accessibility,
100% Failed both minimum accessibility and basic coding standards.
Interesting RSS stats:
25% of Government Department websites use RSS,
11% of Public Body Websites use RSS,
43% of Political Party Websites use RSS.
One thing that strikes me though is that they say they tested seven websites for RSS feeds and only three had them, but if you go to the party news section of this website, which runs on RSS, you will see that Fianna Fail, Labour, Sinn Fein, Greens and the Socialist party all have feeds. That to me is 5 and 71%. The fact that they got that bit wrong makes me wonder if anything else is wrong. The RSS feeds they missed were Sinn Fein and the Socialists. The feeds we get from Fine Gael and the PDs involve some jiggery pokery on our part, hence why Fine Gael’s feed is down as they changed the website.
[Hat Tip: Damien]
Hi Simon
Just to clarify the RSS feeds question - in the report I explain how I tested for RSS feeds. The first test was for auto-discovery from META tags. This is when you visit a website and you see an RSS feed icon in the address bar of your browser (IE/Firefox/Opera). In cases where my browser did not find a feed I inspected the homepage for any mention of RS feed, and if none was found I then proceeded to the press/news page and conducted the same analysis.
While it is possible that I missed a feed using the above technique, I think that users of these sites would probably follow a simiar navigation stream as outlined above. If this process does not locate a feed, I think it unlikely that the general public will discover the feed in question either.
I’m not sure what ‘jiggery pokery’ was required to grab the feeds for this site, but I would wonder would you consider it within the reach of the average web surfer?
My report documents the testing process and I took great care to validate the results. While I cannot say that my approach is 100% optimal, I do think it should be relatively straight-forward for others to conduct similar if not identical tests to mine.
If you have any specific queries I would be delighted to try and answer them for you.
Best regards
Richard (Red Cardinal)
if you go to the Sinn Fein Newsroom there is a link to RSS in the side bar. As for the Socialist ones I have no idea where it is located or how I found it. So fair enough point but it is there.
The jiggery pokery is beyond most users I would say. Involves using a feed creating service. feed43.com. loading that onto another server using a cron job function. Then using a bash script to re-format the xml and then posting that. hence why I said 73%. Then again rss is probably above the average user anyway
I see now the RSS feed on the Sinn Fein News page. I can honestly say that I didn’t see it when I checked the site. I will publish a correction on my site.
Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
I would disagree somehwhat about your comment on RSS and the average user - RSS is now built in to the major browsers and is now far more straight forward to use than was previously the case.
Best regards
Richard