We’re part of Government

Our obligationscoming soon

This is for everyone

Commercial services live and die by the profit they make, based on the number of users they have. They use modern web technologies to create engaging experiences, hoping to outshine the competition. These experiences are compelling enough that users will change their browsing behaviour to use them.

If Facebook needs users to update to the latest version of chrome, there is a good chance most users will. If twitter needs javascript to show users how many characters a tweet has left, users will probably enable it. Any user who doesn’t browse the web in the way these companies expect start to fall through the cracks. For these services, losing a few users is an acceptable trade off to deliver a great user experience to everyone else.

But government services are different.

People use government services because they need to, not because they want to. The government is obligated to make our services accessible to everyone who needs to use them. We don’t have the luxury of telling people to upgrade their browser, or to turn javascript on. Some people aren’t able. Others choose not to.

It doesn’t matter what their reasons are, we need to let users interact with us on their terms, not ours.

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