A survey of UK government web sites by Southampton University has found 61 per cent of them do not comply with internationally agreed HTML standards.

Sites that don't meet standards can prove problematic for screen readers used by blind and partially-sighted readers. 

Non-standard code can also make the sites unreadable in browsers other than Internet Explorer, Adam Field, one of the researchers behind the report says.

'The World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C, has a fairly strict set of standards, called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines about what valid HTML is and isn't,' he said.

'The W3C has an automatic checker for those standards included on its web site and I am surprised government webmasters don't make that check.'

The report also points out that the remaining percentage of government sites researchers checked are error free.

'Thirty nine per cent who do is encouraging,' Field said.

What do you think? Email us at: feedback@computing.co.uk