Simon Jenkins in Canberra | August 07, 2008
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd has promised changes to his government's day-old $13 million grocery price watch website.
A disabled man complained to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) that the Grocerychoice website is difficult to see and discriminatory.
Retailers grumble that the website will do nothing to reduce grocery prices and want the government to look at containing spiralling rents instead.
Mr Rudd says the website would be "refined" as the government considered consumer responses to the service.
"The intention ... is to provide consumers with that choice or information over time about one supermarket chain versus another ... against a basket of goods and we'll continue to refine this over time," Mr Rudd said.
Consumer Affairs Minister Chris Bowen said the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was checking out the disabled man's complaint about the website.
"Any problems that may affect the access of people with a disability will be rectified as soon as possible," Mr Bowen promised.
Grocerychoice keeps a Labor election promise to provide consumers with more information about grocery prices.
The service, updated monthly, lists prices of selected groceries from supermarkets in 61 regions across the country.
But Les Kerr, from Brisbane, has lodged a complaint with HREOC saying the website is difficult for disabled people to use and breaches disability discrimination laws.
Mr Kerr, 53, who has vision and mobility problems, says the website is difficult to read because of the green colour scheme, and there is no option to make on-screen text fonts larger.
"As most disabled people are on pensions and money is always an issue, this website had the potential to be of great assistance to us if it had been designed correctly," he told AAP.
"It appears that the site was put together in a hurry with little thought of allowing disabled people access and most certainly was not tested by disabled people before it came online as any good website should be."
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which administers the website, says Grocerychoice "aims to be as inclusive as possible".
It followed the federal government's guide to minimum website standards/accessibility and the world wide web consortium accessibility guidelines, an ACCC spokesman told AAP.
Queensland Liberal senator Sue Boyce, who launched her own grocery price website, has given the government's version "four out of 10".
Senator Boyce launched her Queensland-based site called ShopSmart last month, which has the added feature of a comparative pricing calculator.
"I've had people already tell me that they're not finding the (Grocerychoice) website terribly useful," Senator Boyce told AAP.
"I think it would be fantastic if we've got a national website that does help people, but I'm not sure that this is it."
ShopSmart was a smaller operation set up specifically for Queensland, but it was set up at "almost no cost at all", she said.
Senator Boyce said the federal site's average pricing system was not specific, and focused on regions that cover large areas such as Longreach to Gladstone, or capital cities as a whole, that have hundreds of supermarkets.
AAP