Hi everyone,
I've written a blog entry today that might be of interest. It's called "The Mystery of the Food Pyramid: An E-Government Fiasco?", and it discusses the new USDA Food Pyramid released this week. The pyramid is actually one of a dozen pyramids now available, based on a person's age, gender and level of physical activity. Unfortunately you need to go online to find out which diet you should follow, and this raises some serious questions regarding the digital divide, e-government for all, and Web accessibility for the disabled. Here are some quotes from my blog:
... I truly, truly hope the USDA does more than just this website to educate the public, though. As I've written before in my work on e-government for all, it's poor policymaking to assume that all constituents will have equal access to the Internet or the skills to use it. Therefore, you need to make sure you use alternative offline channels -- TV, radio, print, in-person meetings, etc -- to make government services and information available to the people who need it.
Unfortunately, when you look at various demographic groups, there's a higher likelihood of lower-income, less-educated people to eat a poor diet. Just the audience you'd want to reach in a public health campaign, right? Paradoxically, they're also the ones least likely to have Internet access or Internet skills. This makes it even more important to invest in large-scale offline campaigns to get health-related information directly into their hands.
Meanwhile, don't get me started on Web accessibilty for the disabled. I ran an accessibility test on the homepage and the "Inside the Pyramid" page, which describes the pyramid in greater detail. Both failed even the most basic accessibility standards; in the case of the homepage, it was because it didn't have alternative text descriptions for all the images on the homepage....
To read more, please visit here:
http://www.andycarvin.com
A permanent link for the article is here: http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2005/04/the_mystery_of.html
thanks, ac
-- ----------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.tsunami-info.org Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com ----------------------------------- _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
