Melissa Madsen’s Posthaven

The news depresses me greatly at the moment. Each morning, I read my feed on BlueSky over coffee and vegemite toast, and it turns into doom-scrolling. The only thing that has cheered me up recently is the story of the Perth Zoo elephant Permai being relocated to South Australia in order to combat loneliness.

4. Participate or organize boycotts of companies that are enabling the Trump regime, starting with Elon Musk’s X and Tesla, and any companies that advertise on X or on Fox News

I did a quick review of public Australian university accounts (plus Bond University) on X, and the majority are active. Flinders University and Queensland University of Technology are exceptions, together with the University of Canberra and The University of Newcastle. The table below shows my findings. (Apologies for the poor formatting of the table - my html skills are rusty.)

I classified accounts as follows:

1. Stated Inactive if the account has an indicator that the account is inactive, irrespective of when the last post was created;
   
2. Functionally Inactive if the account has not posted in the past month, but no obvious indicator that the account is inactive;
   
3. Active if they had a post in the last month.

Here's the message that appears on the X account for Flinders University:

Only two universities had no presence on X that I could find - the new Adelaide University and the University of New South Wales. 

Call to Action

I will write to the Marketing Director for the university where I currently work to respectfully suggest that they should cease using X to promote the university's activities, as associating the university brand with a platform whose proprietor uses Nazi salutes and flirts with the far right in Germany is ultimately damaging.

I will also write to the Marketing Director for the university from which I graduated to suggest the same.

Universities Australia (whose X account appears to be active) helpfully publishes a directory of Australian university Marketing Directors.

It is not the boycott that Robert Reich advocated, but universities withdrawing from X helps to stop the normalisation of anti-semitism and hate speech. I urge you to write to the universities with which you have a relationship also.

My father has recently had surgery that led to a few complications, such that he needs some additional help at home. His level of comfort with websites is reasonably small - last year, when I suggested that he might buy me a gift voucher from Etsy as a Christmas present led to his declaring that he never wanted to visit Etsy's website again. 

So I offered to put in a request for an ACAT assessment in order that he might get some additional help at home, or at least get put on the waitlist for a package.

So far, so good. I did the right thing and declared that I was completing the application form on behalf of my father, rather than completing the form as my father. I was contacted to advise that Dad would need to give his authorisation to the Department of Health and Aged Care for me to act on his behalf in this way. This seems entirely reasonable, so I downloaded the PDF form to record his agreement, completed the form, and arranged for him to sign in the right places, after reading the form's contents.

No problem so far. I scanned the form as a PDF and uploaded it into the My Aged Care portal, which sits behind the myGov portal. This generated an error message to indicate that file uploads could be no greater than 5 MB in size. Fair enough. Try as I might, however, I could not get the PDF file to be less than 5 MB in size. I deleted the instruction pages, keeping only the pages that had actual content needed for this authorisation, with no luck. So I tried another approach to export to PDF document in another format - this time, a PNG file. Success! The resulting file was under 5 MB in size and uploaded successfully with no error. My job was done.

Or so I thought. The following day I had a phone call from the Department of Health and Aged Care. The person on the other end of the phone line advised that they couldn't open my PNG files - they could only open JPEG and PDF files. OK. Back to the drawing board. I'll export each page of the form as a JPEG file and upload multiple files. So that's what I did. The resulting files were under 5 MB in size and uploaded successfully with no error. My job was done. 

Or so I thought (again). The following day I had another phone call from the Department of Health and Aged Care. The different person on the other end of the phone line advised that they couldn't open my JPEG files - they could only open PDF files. OK. Back to the drawing board. I'll export each page of the form as a PDF file and upload multiple files. So that's what I did. The resulting files were under 5 MB in size and uploaded successfully with no error. My job was done.

I expressed more than little frustration at the second person who rang from the Department of Health and Aged Care - not her fault or responsibility obviously that their web portal has more than few user interface issues - but I suggested she convey the following feedback to the department's web developers:

1. I am an IT consultant and I had difficulties navigating the file upload process. How on earth do people in their target demographic (people over 65 years of age) cope with this website, particularly people in the upper end of this demographic cohort? 
2. File sizes of 5 MB are too small. I get that you need to put some constraints on the file sizes that people can upload, but perhaps the department needs to pay AWS a bit more money for file storage and allow uploads to 10 MB.
   
3. There is no indication about allowable file types on the web page itself. I was completely unaware that they couldn't read PNG or JPEG files until they phoned me. At a minimum, the web page should indicate what types of files are acceptable. 
4. Better still, the web page should not allow users to upload files types that are not acceptable. This has security implications as well, particularly if the web page is allowing executable (EXE) files to be uploaded. (I was tempted to try this to prove a point, but didn't.)
5. Finally, the web page should not require me to provide the name of the uploaded file in addition to uploading the file, i.e. you've got the uploaded file, why do I need to tell you what it is called?

Good website design is not (or shouldn't be) a mystery anymore. The federal government with the assistance of its own Digital Transformation Agency should be leading the way in user experience (UX) design with departmental portals that sit behind the myGov portal, e.g. the ATO, Centrelink, My Aged Care, the NDIS, and especially those portals where users are likely to have accessibility needs or user interface requirements that are greater than those of the average user. Instead, we have a mish-mash of portals that look completely different despite serving similar needs, e.g. My Aged Care and the NDIS, where user experience is so poor that posting the form was looking like a better option than persevering with upload.