eCensus – Why won’t they give a straight answer ?

My wife works for a certain Government Department and received notice last week that the upcoming Census in August could be filled out on-line and the suggestion was made that all Government employees should avail themselves of this.

Being Mac & Linux users, with no Windows machines or installations in the house (and no desire or intention of creating any), I emailed the ABS, from the form on their website, and asked them the following relatively simple questions;

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From: Client Services [mailto:client.services@abs.gov.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 19 July 2011 8:49 AM
To: ABS General
Subject: Inquiry/2011 Census Inquiry/ [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

An inquiry has been received
Name: xxxxxxxxx
Email: xxxxxxxxx
Phone: xxxxxxxxx

My wife, who works for a Government department, has just received notice of the availavility of eCensus.
Can you guarantee that the census forms will work regardless of operating system (i.e. on Mac OSX and Linux), and regardless of browser (Safari, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera at least) ?
And will there be any use of FLASH on the site, or other technologies that will impair completion of the form using a portable device such as an iPhone or iPad ?

Being web-based having this compatability would not exactly be rocket science.

19/07/2011 08:49:20 ZE10

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Free publications and statistics available on www.abs.gov.au

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I would have thought that the above was fairly simple. After all, if they have written their web pages to recognised and ratified HTML standards, this should be no great problem. It should – it MUST – be compatible with any device on the market that uses a standard browser.

Here’s their incomplete reply so far;

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This confuses me somewhat. They state, in the first line, that eCensus is not designed to be accessed by portable hand-held devices, and then in the last sentence state that it will work on iPads and iPhones ?? They have contradicted themselves almost immediately.

They also state that it has been tested with a PC – no mention of Macintosh or Linux, as in my original question, nor of other browsers ? Are we to take this, on the face of it, to mean that unless you are running Windows in some incarnation and, by inference, the pathetically inept Internet Explorer, you will be unable to successfully complete the eCensus ? I am still waiting to hear back from them on this.

In this day and age, where we are moving towards online EVERYTHING, there is ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE for creating an online service that is incompatable with a large and growing portion of the population’s hardware.

As a further example, examine this (admittedly creative) explanation of why the census is so important. It uses Adobe’s “Flash” technology as well – not supported universally. Yes, there is an “accessable” version, which is poorly-written text, but you loose all of the functionality and the audio track that explains much of how the Census works.

Writing this whole thing – the eCensus AND the explanation – could have been written in HTML5 and CSS3, ratified and tested STANDARDS, with fairly minimal effort, and avoided disadvantaging the non-Windows using population of this country.

The whole idea of the eCensus is partly to save the ABS money and time in producing the census statistics – it would be great to actually be able to see the data live as it is entered, or at least within 6 months of the census, rather that years and years as is the current situation.

If the ABS doesn’t guarantee this situation will be addressed site-wide as a matter of priority, I certainly encourage people to refuse to use the eCensus site and fill in the PAPER census – make them work for their money.

Comments are most welcome.