Probation Board of Northern Ireland

E-consultation is often criticized on the grounds that different groups of people do not have equal access to electronic communications technologies. They may not be able to afford Internet access at home, or have the skills or confidence to use Internet facilities in libraries, community centres or cybercafés. As a general criticism, it is a weak one. The most common consultation technique used in Ireland is to write a long document (40, 50 or even 200 pages) in language that only makes sense to professionals, send it out to a few hundred organisations, and expect people there to read and digest it, then write long replies. Such processes discriminate against those with little time, and those who do not have very high reading ages. Few e-consultation techniques will exclude so many people. From the beginning, we have proposed e-consultation techniques as complementary to traditional approaches, rather than replacements. Each technique can reduce participation: but the groups excluded are different. However, no matter what you do to make electronic access simpler, there are still people who will find it difficult to participate. In this section we discuss what can be done to improve accessibility and usability for some of these groups.

Designing a usability test

Designing a usability test of an e-consultation interface for ex-offenders