Speaker's information
Sylvia
ARCHMANN Working for the Federal Chancellery in Austria, Director of HELP.gv.at
Acad.degree in economy and informatics Well experienced in public adminstrative
development reforms.
Information sur l'auteur
Sylvia ARCHMANN est diplômée en économie et informatique. Elle travaille à la Chancellerie Fédérale en Autriche. Elle est directrice du portail de services administratifs HELP. Elle a une longue expérience du développement des services administratifs et de leur modernisation.
Short paper
What is www.help.gv.at (HELP)
HELP is an Internet platform with links to a large number of public authorities.
The portal provides information on all kind of interactions with Austrian
authorities required in the most frequent, so called 'life situations'. HELP
services describe the individual steps to be taken when interacting with authorities,
describes background information and indicates links for more detailed information.
Whereas during the first years the main emphasis was on the provision of information
to citizens in electronic format, today there is an increasing trend towards
complete electronic processing of all administrative procedures. HELP permits
the electronic processing of an increasing number of standard administrative
procedures. The "life situations" cover different subjects of the
life circle like pregnancy, childbirth, marriage, housing, business, disability,
immigration, ..., and offer information on administrative processes, the required
documents, fees and deadlines and other interesting links. Specialised services
for areas like e.g. business, immigration, disability are put in place and
optimised in co-operation with interest groups.
Up to date HELP offers access to more than 200 such life situations. Step
by step additional life situations are added to the system offering information
and also electronic processing of administrative services. A growing number
of partner authorities at national, regional/provincial and local/municipal
level use and integrate their services into HELP. It is the political goal
that HELP should become a "one stop portal" for all administrative
services and information in Austria.
The project "HELP barrierefrei" (barrier free)
HELP wants to be an interface between authorities and all citizens/organisations.
To be able to act as "the" public web portal it has a special emphasis
on criteria as transparency, readability, clarity and concentration on essential
facts as well as important procedures. This brings HELP by it's nature close
to usability and accessibility issues. For a public service in a democratic
society access by all regardless of their needs including those with disabilities,
different cultural and language background has been a key criterion for such
a system. Three major reasons led to the "HELP barrierefrei" initiative:
- the awareness and the democratic need to make administrative information and procedures accessible and usable for everybody
- the fact that e-government can only be cost effective if it reaches the broadest user group possible
- the legal necessity for accessibility based on directives of the EC (eEurope) and in accordance to Austrian laws:
- the e-government legislation which asks that all public web services are accessible by the year 2008
- and the planned anti-discrimination legislation which should be put in place this year
In the process of a general re-design of HELP the project "HELP barrierefrei" was put in place to make HELP a reference for an accessible and user friendly web system. To reach this ambitious goal accessibility and usability experts are involved from the beginning, a core requirement to avoid adaptations afterwards and to keep the costs of an accessible system low. The project focuses on the user interface of the portal. The project does not exclusively work towards accessibility for people with disabilities. It takes accessibility and usability for this target group as an integral part of user centred design or "design for all". The project defined the following user groups for accessibility and usability work:
- (standard users)
- blind people
- visually impaired people
- deaf people
- hearing impaired people
- people with mobility and movement problems
- people with cognitive problems and
- elderly people
A consortium was put in place bringing experts for these user groups in contact with the design agency as well as the partner responsible for the technical implementation. Such a situation of distributed responsibilities over different partners is typical for larger scale projects in this area. Due to this approach it is guaranteed that accessibility and usability issues are taken into consideration from the first steps of conceptual design towards implementation. As the experts for the different target groups are closely related with user organisations, a focus is given on user involvement and user testing at all stages of the project. People with disabilities are involved as experts, too.
At the beginning the state of the art of the HELP system as well as a new concept are analysed and evaluated. Together with the know how of users with disabilities and experts the specification of the new system is in discussion and will be adapted. Several prototypes will be put in place which will be tested and evaluated by the consortium and end-users from the different target groups.
Besides focusing on the WAI guidelines a special focus is given to the accessibility for deaf people as well as people with cognitive problems by supporting concepts like sign language videos and easy to read language.
The system will be based on a Content Management System (CMS) and several templates to guarantee that the content will be in accordance with the defined concepts and standards. To guarantee a constant quality of the information authoring guidelines tailored for this specific system will be defined which have special attention on the preservation of the accessibility and usability.
The project is in its early stage of evaluating the existing system and defining
the first prototypes of the new one. This presentation will present the organisation
and the workflow between all stake holders - governmental authorities, design
companies, technical partners, accessibility experts - as an example how to
work towards accessibility for an important e-government application.
Conclusion
Public authorities promote HELP as a "one stop" access point to
administrative online services and information. Due to the importance of HELP
the project "HELP barrierefrei" will make the access to administrative
services for people with disabilities more accessible, independent, easy and
user friendly. We hope that HELP will be a model example of a web portal and
other initiatives will follow this example.
