Chapter and Verse Blog

At VerseOne, we believe that in order to be the best at what we do we should constantly be building upon and expanding our knowledge in each area of the business—this is driven by a passion and enthusiasm that makes each team member hungry to learn more about their individual area of expertise.

Hilda Allen, one of VerseOne's longest serving designers, recently made the trip home across the Irish Sea to OFFSET— an annual 3 day event in Dublin — to see 24 globally recognised designers share, discuss and debate – very much along the lines of a ‘creative Glastonbury’.

“I was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend OFFSET” says Hilda, “Having attended the inaugural event back in 2009, I wanted to see how ideas and trends had evolved since then.  And the chance to hear creative giants such as Louise Fili, Bob Gill and Ben Newman one after the other is not one to be missed.”

How have ideas around design evolved since then?

“Design these days is seen more as the solution to a problem rather than just the pretty stuff on top. Good design adds value. At the same time be careful of what you put out there, you’ll run the risk of doing it all the time.”

two key takeaways for Hilda were;

• Don’t be precious about your ideas, or worry what it looks like. Make it communicate with and relevant to the user
• Get off the computer sometimes. Odd for a web designer to say, but working by hand allows you to think more about the work, and focus on the aesthetic.

And asked what this means for VerseOne customers Hilda is working with?

“Engage with your users! But also that collaboration through the project is a good thing—typography and colours can do the job but what else can we do to push it further? Finally that good ideas drive a good design.”

There are several agencies in the market of offering good-value, successful membership recruitment services. These range from face-to-face recruitment at key events or on the street, through to sub-contracted telephone campaigns. But how do you ensure that you are engaging effectively with the members that these services are bringing in?

Research has shown that fewer than 10% of trusts look purely to increase membership numbers. Ninety-two per cent are focused on either better engaging with current members, or equally focused on increasing numbers whilst ensuring effective engagement.

An estimated average of nearly 38 hours a week is currently being spent on membership engagement, not accounting for any activity aimed at membership recruitment — the equivalent of a full time position. Despite this, only 17% of trusts have a dedicated membership manager, with the remainder letting the duties fall to either communications managers or trust secretaries — roles that already have their own substantial workload.

To compensate for this dispersal of focus, it is important that the available time is spent undertaking tasks that have a proven record of successful engagement. A recent study showed that whilst the number of trusts undertaking regular e-bulletins is lower than those preferring traditional paper based communications, the return in relation to the activity is around 4 times higher.

That is not to say that paper-based communications do not have their place — not all members may have regular access to the internet or email, or check their inboxes often enough to be able to respond to time-sensitive material such as surveys. But for the vast majority, who can access email on the go, via smart phones and mobile devices, e-communications are a more practical, and effective approach.

Current technologies built for email marketing lend themselves to a much more targeted approach to engagement:

• Real time analytics and reports drawn from the database allow you to measure, refine and adjust your approach to ensure that you are getting the best results from all communications. 

• Creating contact lists according to a set of criteria, and the intelligence to automatically add new contacts that fit that criteria, mean that email-based campaigns can be customised per demographic, creating messages relevant to the target audience.

• Supported collaborative working across the trust. Whilst membership managers need access to the information in order to manage the membership, chief executives and trust secretaries may also need access in order to carry out reporting or provide evidence of engagement.

Without a membership engagement tool, collaborative working can become a nightmare of spreadsheets, duplicating data without version control— a recognised pain within the sector. This in turn leads to the issue of having to ensure all copies reflect the same data, meaning processes have to be implemented to replicate any changes across all versions.

By having a single repository for the information, with access being given to those who need it, based on a permissions system, these unnecessary information silos — and the duplication that goes with them — can be eliminated.  

The current targets for trusts to have a membership 1% of their constituency population can seem daunting at first, but by investing in the correct systems — systems that allow for smarter, more targeted and efficient engagement — they can be easily met at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.  

VerseOne’s Membership Management tool has been developed in partnership with several leading Foundation Trusts. This collaboration has resulted in a product which addresses concerns and issues surrounding membership management. To find out more about VerseOne’s Membership Management tool, or for a demonstration, click here to contact us.

In these modern days of the world wide web, film geeks who play the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" have a great resource in the Internet Movie Database. Using links, you can hop from any actor to Kevin Bacon, via shared films with other actors, in just six clicks.

And research has shown you can do the same thing with regular Joes too: your connection to any person in the world is, statistically, separated by only six people.

It was only a matter of time before someone did the same research with the web itself: according to the Daily Mail, everything on the web is just 19 clicks away.

Just as with Kevin Bacon, and people who aren't actors, this is because some steps along the way are via super-hubs: Kevin Bacon is a famously prolific film artist; you have a friend who has a friend who knows somebody who knows everybody; and the web has super-hubs like Google and Facebook, which index and share loads and loads of content from the estimated 14 billion pages on the world wide web.

What does this mean for your website?

For one thing, it means that connecting your content to these super-hubs is vitally important for your visibility on the web. Your customers and stakeholders are more likely to arrive at your content from Facebook likes and shares, tweets, or Google searches than via any other route. And this is where your valuable "web brand ambassadors" contribute to the effectiveness of your site: those anonymous people who voluntarily, and often without your knowledge, pass the word about what you do and what you offer online.

It also diminishes the need to worry about the well-known "3-click rule"—the practice that no page on your website should be more than 3 clicks away from any other page on your website. As the image in the Daily Mail article shows, websites that are linked by common language, geography, and culture are even more closely connected than the average: meaning that as long as your website is within 3 clicks of a super-hub, the problem has taken care of itself.

So free yourself from strict navigation structures—and free your website users from the need to anticipate artificial paths through content. Focus instead on access to super-hubs: make sure your site is indexed by Google and search-engine optimised, connect your site to super-hubs such as social media channels, and abandon the 3-click rule.

Web users are smart and lazy: they'll reach your content quickly and easily, in probably in far fewer clicks than you ever imagined.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

As an Accessibility Consultant, much of my time is spent conducting accessibility and usability audits of websites—mainly in the UK public sector.

At VerseOne’s upcoming Accessibility Focus events in January, I have been asked to present on the most common accessibility and usability errors that I have encountered whilst conducting website audits in 2012.

For my first Accessibility Focus blogpost of 2013 I thought I would list the top 5 accessibility issues that I came across on websites from the NHS, local government and housing sectors in the UK.

I have to say that, before you read on, all these errors were made by designers and content authors who had no idea that they were creating a problem for the disabled visitors to their website. Whilst, they were all mortified when they realised how they could be affecting their users, they showed great diligence and enthusiasm to make the necessary changes for WCAG 2.0 compliance.

As well as listing the issues themselves, for  a bit of fun I have also accompanied the list with a quiz. You can submit you’re answers in the comments below, or book onto one of the free events in January. At the end of the month we’ll post the answers up on the blog.

So what are the 5 most common accessibility errors?

1. Not tell users in advance what would happen if they clicked on a link.
   Q. What 3 main instances could affect users adversely?
    
2. Use formatting for headings inappropriately.
   Q. Why would this be a significant problem and who would it affect?
    
3. Websites often have short videos that exclude both deaf and blind users.
   Q. What 2 things can be done to ensure that these disabled users are able to gain the same information as people who are not deaf or blind?
    
4. Images are often used to link to another web page or web site which give blind users a problem.
   Q. Apart from forgetting to add alternative text for the image there is another major mistake that content providers make in this respect – what could that be?
    
5. One of the most common motor impairments is found in office workers who have repetitive strain injury and can no longer use a mouse. They often end up just relying on the keyboard to navigate web pages. Unfortunately many websites make this very hard for these users.
   Q. What is the most common difficulty they might experience when doing this?

Penny Everett

Web Accessibility Consultant

If you would like to see Penny's presentation in January 2013 click here to book onto an Accessibility Focus event near you, or share your thoughts on the answers to any of the questions in the comments box below.

The rise of the mobile device has changed the way that people are accessing, viewing and interacting with websites. With a increasingly larger number of people accessing the web from a mobile device — around 28% of internet usage in the UK is from a smartphone (set to increase with the introduction of 4G) — there have been three different strategies emerge to ensure that those accessing a site ‘on the go’ are receiving as high-quality an experience as those using a computer.

These three options are:

1. Mobile Stylesheet (‘Responsive Design’)
2. Mobile Optimisation
3. Mobile Application (‘App’)

All three have pros and cons that need to be weighed up to choose the right solution for your site.

Mobile Stylesheet (‘Responsive Design’)

Responsive design applies a new stylesheet (CSS) over the top of the current site. The site then reacts to the size of the browser window the site is being viewed on to display only the most important information, avoiding having to zoom into a page to select the right option.

Advantages

• Quick to create
• Easy to implement
• Widely Used (Google’s preferred solution)
• Superior User Experience
• Single URL

Disadvantages

• Does not strip out large files (can cause longer loading times)
• Users can only complete transactions whilst connected to the web (Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G)
• Forced compromise — have to consider both responsive and full site in design process

A mobile stylesheet is recommended for those for whom accessibility and speed is a high priority. The single URL also helps strengthen SEO ratings, and also means that any content updated on the full site doesn’t then have to be replicated on a mobile site.

Mobile Optimisation

Mobile optimisation requires a different site of HTML templates to be built and styled. These will then be shown every time the site is accessed from a mobile browser. As it uses a different set of templates, the site also has its own URL — typically beginning with m. — and strips down the content to only the most necessary.

Advantages

• Ideal for activity based websites (Facebook uses it) and site with transactional functions
• Faster loading times
• Stores offline activity, and then uploads it next time a connection to the web is established

Disadvantages

• Intensive to implement, especially if customised on a per client basis
• Different URL – although you can redirect

Again, the optimisation option is recommended for those who place high value on accessibility. Due to its nature it is suited to sites where people may want to engage in more activity and transaction based functions, and the advantage of storing data and allowing people to work offline adds to this.

Mobile Application (‘App’)

A piece of software native to the mobile device, an app recreates the website in a format which users can then download onto their device. Apps come into their own when handling a large amount of transactional activity — such as banking, retail and blogging/social media.

Because of the variables from device to device it is always going to require more financial and resource investment to design, build and test an app than other solutions. The regular release of mobile operating system updates also makes ongoing maintenance an issue — an app will need regular updates in order to work on every software version.

Advantages

• Ideal for transaction based web services
• Doesn’t not require a connection to the web to do things
• Can provide an additional source of revenue
• Can store details to avoid having to re enter

Disadvantages

• Longer development times
• Requires extra resource for supporting and updating different versions
• Stores user details – may pose a security risk should the user lose their phone

An app is the recommended solution if the user needs to participate in a lot of transaction and interaction. The strong integration with the other functionality of the device means that users can take advantage of ‘tap to call’ functionality in the app, or storing information in the calendar.

John Sexton ( john@developer.plus.com) is a visually impaired user and he will be presenting a talk on the issue of Web Accessibility as well as demonstrating the use of assitive technology at VerseOne's upcoming Accessibility Focus events in January 2013 that are free to attend for organisations in the public or private sector.

John Sexton discusses Web Accessibility

John has 11 years experience of working in the NHS as a web developer, specialising in accessibility, user experience and web application build and design.

In this time John has had personal experience of the evolution of text to speach (TTS) and the ongoing development of specialist assistive technology for people with special requirements.

A recent Braille student and advocate of the use of Braille in digital media, member of UKAAF and many online groups for accessibility in technology.

Reflecting on his experience and knowledge in this area John has put together a set of questions that he will be covering at January's Accessibility Focus Sessions:

"These ten key questions are based on both my personal and professional experience in my 11 year web development career as a visual impared person.

1  Why does the web have the potential to be the most accessible communication medium?

2  What benefits are there in web accessibility?

3  How does learning from experience help future projects?

4  What is progressive enhancement and how does it help?

5  What is AJAX and can it be made accessible?

6  What are captcha's and do they work?

7  Do separate text only versions of websites help?

8  What is assistive technology and how does it help people?

9  What new technologies are being used and how do they improve people's lives?

10 What social impact does the web have on communities and how is it breaking barriers and prejudices?

Attend this upcoming event to hear and discuss these key questions and much more. 

Or you can contact me at john@developer.plus.com"

If you would like to hear John's presentation click here to book onto an Accessibility Focus event near you, or share your thoughts on the answer to any of the questions in the comments box below.

2013 brings with it a number of deadlines for the implementation of the Welfare Reforms Act 2012.

Under the new system housing benefit will be paid monthly directly to the tenant as part of the single benefit. Having received the payment, it is then the tenant’s responsibility to then ensure that payments are made in full and on time. The implications of the new system for the housing sector have been much publicised — failure by a tenant to pay on time means that the housing association are then saddled with the arrears.

Many organisations have already introduced a pay online facility giving tenants the opportunity to pay rent as soon as they receive their monthly payment — eliminating the risk of arrears, and empowering the tenant to take control of their finances.

Many of VerseOne's #UKHousing customers have been examining ways to manage the tranisition towards the Universal Credit System via the web. From speaking to several of them, here is a summary of the different methods they are using to encourage online payments.

Should your organisation use social media?

With over 40 million Facebook users in the UK (according to Socialbakers) its no surprise that each week, hundreds of UK marketers are planning to create or modify a Facebook page for their organisation.

But its not just Facebook, Twitter use in the UK has skyrocketed this year with the number of reported users more than doubling from 12 million to 26 million.

Given this, it is no surprise that increasingly, registered providers of social housing, NHS Trusts, Local Authorities, Local businesses and even train operators are running twitter accounts as official communications channels for their organisation.

However, this kind of activity is only effective if it is kept strategic: this means engaging a key target audience group to advance a key top-level business objective, specifically in the context of the individual organisation.

With other channels such as LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and more—how do you know which social media channels are right for your organisation? How do you know if any channels are relevant at all?

It is first essential to go through the process of putting together a social media strategy, or in most cases a wider ‘Digital Strategy’ that marries up all of your social media activity with the rest of your online presence—crucially the website (if driving more of the right type of traffic to your site is a priority of your organisation)—and in most cases with your wider offline communications as well.

Often planning does not take place, and many organisations instead favour a ‘trial and error’ or ‘phased’ approach to their social media activity—this means that the performance of the channel is reactive rather than proactive.

In my presentation ‘Creating an Effective Digital Strategy’, the objective is to provide organisations with a framework that can be taken back and applied to your own-setting—regardless of the status of your digital marketing activity.

By showing you this process, the objective is to empower you to ensure that—by incorporating objectives that are unique to your organisation, industry, target audiences, the resources available—your social media and wider online activity are strategic and thus advancing your wider business objectives.

It is free to come along to VerseOne’s upcoming events in Guildford, London, Manchester and Scotland at the end of October and in November where I will be taking attendees through the process for ‘Creating an Effective Digital Strategy’—you can join the sessions by registering for free here.

Or if you would like to find out more about the rest of the speakers and agendas for the sessions, you can read more about the Housing Hot Topics events here, read more about the NHS Hot Topics Event here, more about the Scottish Hot Topics event here and read more about the Guildford Digital Strategy Seminar here.

In honour of this week's 25th Hay Festival, we decided to revisit the theme of favourite books, this time for adults rather than children's novels. Here are some of the VerseOne team's most cherished reads.

James, Account Manager—Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

Callum, Marketing Executive—Roses Are Red by James Patterson: "Roses are Red is my particular favourite as it introduces 'The Mastermind' a criminal that is recurring throughout the series, and Cross's most interesting foe. As his name suggests, The Mastermind is extremely intelligent, and somehow has intricate knowledge of Cross and his personal life, using this to tease and manipulate Cross all the way through the book. In this storyline, The Mastermind, although intelligent, starts as little more than a violent bank robber, although his character is expanded and built upon during the book and later novels. A main draw of the series is how human Patterson has made the lead protagonist. Rather than a law-abiding, to-the-letter all round good guy, Cross freely admits to wanting to physically hurt and kill The Mastermind, particularly when his family is endangered. Cross works with Kyle Craig, an FBI agent, and John Samspon, a fellow Washington PD cop and Cross's best friend, and Patterson uses these two very different relationships to showcase both sides of Cross's character. This book is followed by Violets are Blue, in which we learn the identity of The Mastermind, a plot twist that I was totally underprepared for."

William, Project Manager—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

Chris, Product Manager—Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks: "My original copy of Iain M Banks's Use of Weapons has been read so many times that I had to get a new one a couple of years ago. Given the society's near-Utopian existence, Bank's Culture novels tend to dwell on the edge cases—the areas where the super-power Culture interacts with less developed races. Use of Weapons follows this trend, detailing the exploits of a gun-for-hire and master-of-war called Zakalwe as he undertakes one more job for the Culture's shady Special Circumstances section.

"As the story in the present time unfolds, it is interspersed with counterpoint chapters detailing Zakalwe's earlier life: these chapters move forward in time, until the line of the present meets with the arc of the past in an explosive, shocking denouement. Whilst the skillfulness with which the tale is told would make the book worth reading on its own, there is no less pleasure in revisiting the novel. Because it is only once one knows the ending that one realises that there are many clues scattered throughout the text, and so subsequent re-readings provide a rich, but different, experience."

James, Marketing Executive—The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

Nicky, Business Development Manager—The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

David, Developer—Look to Windward by Iain M Banks

Alan, Executive Chairman—Into Thin Air by John Krakauer

Another area that is being talked about more and more in the commercial world is the business of ‘Social CRM’ (Customer Relationship Management). In a recent AdAge article, Michael Scissons makes the point that many marketers now have more fans and followers across social networks thanthey do email or direct marketing subscribers. Whilst this may not be strictly true for UK public sector Communications & Marketing professionals, it is the case that those that have made the commitment to follow their NHS trust on twitter or engaged with their housing provider on facebook are far more engaged than the passive recipients of a print campaign through their letterbox.

This engagement is incredibly valuable because it is discretionary rather than happening by default. Thus, if the correct approach is taken, in this social following there is the great potential for you as public sector MarComms professionals to cultivate genuine ambassadors for your organisation and its services. To do this effectively it is important to become a source of relevant and valuable content to your online community by talking about the things that are important to them.

Scissons’ article goes on to emphasise the importance of data—and indeed, recommends a number of different technologies and tools to achieve this—but I think much should be borrowed from the thinking behind ‘Social CRM’ rather than the technological aspect, by public sector organisations who are active on social media channels.

The underpinning principle in this article is that ‘Social CRM’ will enable you to gain customer insight and then to act upon it. Whatever the scale of your organisation’s presence on social media, it is undeniable that these channels can provide a unique ‘lens’ into the opinions, expectations and preferences of your current service users.

In fact, during an age where many UK public sector organisations—the NHS and Housing Sectors in particular—will need to become more competitive online, reacting to these insights could also help with the acquiring of new service users.

This is because knowledge is power, and unlike email marketing campaigns, your connections on social media talk back and so the insights gained in this area will enable communications and marketing teams to better plan content and campaigns, and even to anticipate and make changes to service delivery where necessary.

In essence, in the public sector context a ‘Social CRM’ strategy should be less about replacing other technology and delivery channels, and more about trying to better understand and respond to the needs of your patients, tenants or stakeholders. Ultimately, this will allow public sector organisations to take a more agile approach to communications—and indeed service delivery.

An effective social media monitoring strategy is an essential part of doing this successfully, and this is one of the key areas of focus at our upcoming Housing and NHS Hot Topics events that will take place in London and Manchester in October and November.

To view the dates and agendas for these sessions and to reserve your organisation a free place click here.

Who are the heavyweights? (And we’re not just talking Ricky "Witness the Fitness" Martin!)

After this week’s surprise double firing, which saw the sickeningly sweet Gabby and the master of deflection Stephen booted off, we are down to just five contestants in this series of The Apprentice. Stepping into the grizzly shoes of Lord Sugar, we take a slightly biased look at the remaining candidates, and whom we predict will be crowned this series’ winner. Have your say using the poll!

Ricky Martin—A professional wrestler with the name of a Latino pop star? Amazing find. Ricky once declared himself "the reflection of perfection," and, while I wouldn’t go that far, he certainly has kept us entertained during the series, not least during the fitness regime task, where he just seemed to use it as an opportunity to reveal all about his love of bodybuilding and wrestling. In a sentence: A lyrca one piece away from being a caricature of himself.

Tom Gearing—Director of a fine wine investment company, Tom seemed to use the English sparkling wine task as an opportunity to get sloshed with Adam; cue several takes of him just trying to pronounce the name of the product he’s supposed to be endorsing. Comes up with some good ideas at times, although in the boardroom, seems to just sit and pout. In a sentence: Less pouty, more talky needed.

Adam Corbally—If Del Boy was northern he’d be Adam. A fruit and veg wholesaler, he naturally excelled on the business start up task, making full use of his market trader background, much to Karren’s amusement. Wholly surprised that he hasn’t uttered the immortal line "I think Lord Sugar sees a bit of himself in me," though it must be on the tip of his tongue. In a sentence: Probably wondering if he can sell the next task out of a suitcase.

Nick Holzherr—The one who seems to be wearing a small animal on his head. Said animal obviously requires constant attention, as he can’t seem to leave it alone. Doesn’t detract from the glimmers of brilliance that he sometimes exhibits, and he is my personal favourite to win. In a sentence: Foppish hair disguises astute businessman; BoJo of the boardroom.

Jade Nash—The only female left in the running after the departure of Gabby this week. Very shrewd, although am a little worried by her lack of numeracy skills, even when using a calculator; "I can do it if I round the numbers." Has become BFFs with Adam during the process, despite early misgivings about him. In a sentence: Not afraid to make her feelings well known.

UPDATE: Our week-long poll showed that the clear favourite to win was Nick Holzherr, with 67% of the vote. After his close shave this week (all pun intended!), he scraped through to the final, in which we will discover whether he has what it takes to be Lord Sugar's business partner.

by Andrew Neilson

This weekend brings with it the 26th May 2012 deadline for compliance with the "Cookie Law." Although website owners will be spending this week working hard to ensure that they are up to speed with the ICO’s (Information Commissioner’s Office) expectations once Sunday arrives, enforcement of the directive is likely to be as reactive as it has been for previous regulations of its kind.

This is despite the fact that—as well as laying out new rules for how websites can deploy cookies and other similar tracking technologies—the PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) update has granted powers of enforcement to the ICO, including the right to impose monetary penalties of up to £500,000 on organisations whose websites are deemed to be in serious breach of the law.

The PECR update, originally issued on the 26th May 2011, has been widely referred to as the "Cookie Law" because the biggest change to the rules relates to how organisations use "electronic communications networks to store information—e.g. by using cookies—or gain access to information stored in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user." The regulations require that websites consider the user's default position toward cookies—such as those on which Google Analytics relies—to be "opt-in" rather than "opt-out."

The ICO showed clear awareness of the magnitude of compliance work for website owners by announcing a year-long grace period. Some commentators interpreted this to mean that the ICO would begin concentrated enforcement of the directive at the end of this period.

Website owners and providers in the UK—including those of us at VerseOne—have been working hard, dedicating time and resource to making sure that we are following the letter of the law on our own sites and those of our customers.

Now that the ICO has revealed that they will continue to show a degree of leniency and flexibility towards non-compliance—even after their own deadline passes—the appropriateness of the regulations has come into question. Unsurprisingly, web marketers in particular continue to suggest that the update to the PECR is out of touch with the way that the web industry operates.

Others will simply be relieved that the ICO is not going to rule with a heavy hand, and perhaps take comfort in the fact that government websites themselves are struggling to achieve compliance before the deadline.

It is debatable whether the ICO will ever be able to enforce the directive effectively, but its position of leniency certainly reveals the scale, and the levelling effect, of the "Cookie Law" as all website owners find themselves in the same boat.

Guest post by James Ash, Marketing Executive

Nearly two months after the Health and Social Care Bill was finally passed, we are just beginning to see the effects of some of its provisions on the NHS. The latest reforms are hardly as popular as the late Steve Jobs, but embracing his technology could have been the method of by which Andrew Lansley aimed to improve efficiency—rather than cutting important services.

Earlier this month, it was announced that the majority of clinicians at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust will be given iPads in order to access its patients’ electronic records. A move such as this gives the clinicians instant access to vital information when they need it most. No longer will records need to be noted down and laboriously typed up; instead, doctors will be able to scann and save or edit them directly in the new software. Bradford seem to be leading the way as Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, for example, have only just recently signed a deal with Alert Life Sciences Computing for a full Electronic Patient Record System.

Bradford’s new plan to access these records on-the-go may take some staff training and time to adapt to, but this will ultimately improve efficiency whilst retaining vital front-line staff. An important return on the investment is that clinicians will be able to spend more time helping patients, and less time doing paperwork. If you want to be cynical, you could say that embracing mobile technology, such as a tablet device, will allow a hospital to get more work and effective care from its staff for the same salary. Importantly, there is no need to increase the clinicians’ responsibilities—the technology simply helps them to do their jobs even better.

The same can be said for non-clinical staff, too. In the age of Web 2.0, more and more information is firstly managed digitally rather than physically, and secondly, online. Many NHS organisations have their own staff intranet to improve the sharing of information, but there are other alternatives out there. Membership management systems are available, as well as simple file storage spaces like Google Drive or Dropbox.

If the NHS is able to embrace these technologies that many of its staff members love using in their private lives, then their experience with efficiency and staff buy-in will improve. As with any organisation, for the NHS to develop, evolve and ultimately progress, it must be able to adapt to the changing uses and benefits of existing and emerging technologies.

Statistics show British viewers watch an average 30 hours and 4 minutes of TV a week. So for our Fun Friday today we’re talking about people's favourite tv characters.

Nora, Marketing Manager -  My favourite TV character: the Janitor from "Scrubs." He represents Nemesis, the anti-protagonist, and all that is beautiful and good about taking the mick out of pompous know-it-alls.

James, Account Manager - Brian from Family Guy

Callum, Marketing Executive - Pauly D, from the hit MTV show, Jersey Shore. This show is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, and Pauly D is brilliant for the numerous catchphrases and actions that he has, and provides constant entertainment from his ‘crazy stalkers’, of which there are many. He comes across as an all round good guy, although not the sharpest.

James, Marketing Executive -  I will choose Homer Simpson as my favourite TV character. He is the everyman that many would love to be. He has a supportive wife, a big home and manages to get involved in nearly every occupation you can think of. Some say The Simpsons has run its course and should gracefully retire into the archives, but in the 90s, it was the funniest thing on TV. It was as nonsensical as it was touching. No wonder Seth MacFarlane ripped it off.

David, Developer - Jon Snow (Channel 4 news)

Penny, Web Accessibility Consultant - Mine's Saga Noren, the Police detective in the Nordic Noir TV drama "The Bridge".

Hilda, Graphic Designer - Although not a TV character I think Nick Hewer from The Apprentice is my favourite. I think his facial expressions are hilarious and how he takes no bull. 

Andrew, Digital Marketing Executive - There is no more Jeremy Piven, only Ari Gold from HBO's eight series spectacular—Entourage. The plot is supposed to revolve around the life of Hollywood golden boy Vincent Chase and his adventures as an A-list actor, but without Ari Gold's tornado of mockery, sarcasm and fury there would be no show—or it least it wouldn't be as funny! His commitment and loyalty to his job and his key client is pretty infectious as well. If you've never seen the man in action this clip will reveal what I'm talking about.

Guest post by Chris Mounsey, Product Manager

Some of our readers may have heard of the exciting possibilities offered by HTML5, particularly in the area of native audio and video playback.

The idea is that we will no longer have to rely on plugins—such as Adobe Flash (currently the most widespread), Windows Media Player or Apple Quicktime—to be immersed in the wonderful world of online multimedia.

The problem is that, like many great ideas, the devil is in the details—or, in this case, the war between a number of different codecs.

Despite the fact that it is necessary for me to get a little technical in places, I hope that by the end of this (admittedly slightly lengthy) post, you will have a decent understanding of the problems facing HTML5 media playback.

Not only will this impress your friends (possibly), but it will also enable you to appreciate the good news nestling at the end of this small essay...

Background

Without trying to be too techie, playing video on the web depends on two main elements:

1. the codec under which the video file was compressed (or encoded), and
2. the container used to bring all of the elements (e.g. video and audio) together.

The benefits of the latter very much depend on the format of the former.

Benefits

The HTML5 <video> tag provides a standardised container for playing video codecs, and for providing various controls, e.g. play, pause, etc. And, of course, the audio tag does the same for sounds.

Up until now, publishers have had to use Flash containers—which, of course, require Adobe’s Flash plugin. Flash is near ubiquitous on modern computers but the inaccessibility of many Flash players—combined with some rather serious security bugs and the plugin’s large appetite for memory—has made it a less than ideal solution.

Not only this, but the code for embedding an HTML5 video is very simple, e.g. <video src="someclip.mp4" controls /> embeds your video and delivers standard controls.

Whereas embedding a Flash video requires something more like this:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0" width="400" height="300" id="movie" align=""><param name="movie" value="movie.swf""><embed src="movie.swf" quality="high" width="400" height="300" name="movie" align="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></object>

Ugh.

Anyway, the HTML5 video tag is supported in all modern browsers—Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and IE9+—but, unfortunately, we have been largely unable to take advantage of this.

Why?

Because of a fight between browser vendors over the codecs.

Codecs

Over time, a number of video codecs have been developed for use on the web.

1. Ogg Theora is generally acknowledged to deliver pretty poor quality video, but it is open-source.
2. H.264 (or MP4) was developed by the MPEG LA organisation (which includes a number of hardware and software corporations, and which also developed MP3) and delivers very high-quality video with decent compression.
3. WebM is a Google-sponsored open source codec, the quality of which is rather better than Ogg.

Browsers

Broadly speaking, what has happened is this...

The Mozilla Foundation—which develops Firefox—is immensely committed to open source codebases and, as such, refused to adopt H.264; instead, they relied on Ogg Theora (in the early days) but their browsers will now also play WebM.

Apple enthusiastically embraced H.264—believing (rightly, in my opinion) that it delivered the best experience for its customers. Any videos you buy or rent from iTunes are delivered in H.264 format (as are most DVD movies for that matter). Further, since iOS devices (i.e. iPhones and iPads) do not have Flash, H.264 embedded in the <video> tag is the way of delivering web video to these devices.

Google Chrome supported both Ogg and H.264; however, a couple of years ago, the company stated that they would, in future, only support Ogg and WebM.

Until IE9, Microsoft's browsers simply did not support the <video> tag at all: IE9, however, supports all of the above formats.

In other words, in order to be able to deliver HTML5 video to all compatible browsers, you would have to encode your video at least twice—once as H.264 and once as WebM (or, possibly, Ogg)—upload both versions to your website, and link to both versions when embedding it in your page.

And you would still have to provide a Flash fallback to cater for older browsers.

HTML5 video and VerseOne CMS

That was the state of play at the time that the VerseOne Development team decided to develop the standard media player in VerseOne CMS (back around June 2011).

Believing that our customers—not usually technical—would not want to encode, upload and embed two video formats, we decided on the following course of action.

1. The media player would support embedded Flash videos (as before).
2. Users could also upload H.264 (or MP4) format files too. When these were embedded into the page, the system would detect what browser viewers were using.
   • Those using IE9, Chrome or Safari (on Mac or Windows) will be served the HTML5 <video> version. And, critically, those using iPhones and iPads are able to view the videos using the HTML5 <video> tag.
   • All other browsers would be provided with a Flash container.

This last catered (in theory) for mobile phones running Android or Windows since Adobe were working on—and had (sort of) delivered—a Flash plugin for mobile devices.

Unfortunately, this always ran pretty poorly on low-power mobiles and Adobe cancelled that project in January 2012.

(As a result, we will be revisiting our policy for these devices.)

The Good News

So, we currently have two browsers that support HTML5 video: IE9 and Safari (including Mobile Safari).

And, despite their announcement a couple of years ago, Google have not dropped support for H.264 in Chrome—nor do they show any sign of actually doing so.

So that leaves Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation. It's just one browser, but Firefox now is used by about 25% of web users—a significant number of people to leave out in the cold. (By comparison, IE now has around 35%, Chrome 20% and Safari of all flavours 12%.)

So, we welcome the news that the Mozilla Foundation is finally debating enabling support for H.264. Provided that Mozilla push ahead,  all of the major browsers will shortly support the H.264 codec.

We can then provide a reliable, standards-based recommendation to our customers as regards their video options, i.e. that they should encode their video as H.264 MP4 files (as they should currently do if they wish to deliver to iOS devices).

We can modify our media player to serve video via the HTML5 <video> tag, and support more platforms and more systems (whilst still providing the Flash fallback for less capable browsers).

Conclusion

This will remove a thoroughly thorny problem for us (and for our users) and allow the industry to move forward in providing an excellent, standardised and flexible delivery method for video on the web.

Because today is internationally recognised as Star Wars Day, we’ve come over ever-so-slightly geeky here at VerseOne and have compiled a list of our favourite science fiction moments. Click on the links to see the scenes!

Independence Day, "Welcome to Earth."—Chosen by Alex, Server-Side Developer, this is the moment Will Smith, playing a USAF pilot, has his first encounter with one of the alien attackers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfPWpEKhgfk

Blade Runner, "Tears in rain"—Graham, Designer/Implementer, has picked the famous speech by the Replicate Roy Batty at the end of the film. Trivia: this speech was improvised entirely by Rutger Hauer, the actor delivering it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAJGM8c6Wg4

Star Wars, THAT scene (SPOILER ALERT)—It had to crop up somewhere, and James, Marketing Executive, has picked it. The infamous moment Darth Vader delivers possibly one of the biggest plot twists committed to celluloid. Not the way I’d want to find out my parentage! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um_dn7Fe-lw

Starship Troopers, "Would you like to know more?"—Nora, Marketing Manager, has gone for "a hilarious, farcical element to what is really quite a nasty film.’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faFuaYA-daw

Star Wars, "I can feel your anger"—Chris, Product Manager, has opted for another Star Wars moment, this time when Luke and the Emperor come face to face. In his own words: "I think that I am going to have to go with the entirety of the Emperor sequence at the end of Jedi. Ian McDiarmid is fantastically evil, and provides so many great quotes. The way that his voice cracks on the final word of 'I can feel your anger' is pure genius." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8d0ffaO0Ms

Last week, David and Karsten of @VerseOneDev and @VerseOneDesign spent a day out at the "Bacon" conference at the Mermaid Conference & Events Centre in London.

Bacon is a two-day, two-track conference with thirty-two tasty sessions on topics including web development, machine learning, and the Internet of Things.

Karsten writes:

On the day, I think I was probably the only designer there. I think it's important that any good designer understands the wider technologies and technicalities that the development team works with and is therefore able communicate with and be briefed by a developer in the developer's terms, terminology, and language. This makes it easier for designers to understand the limitations in the relationship between design and functionality on the web.

The two speakers that really stood out for me on the day were Chris Haseman (@haseman), Lead Android Developer at www.tumblr.com, and Zach Holman (@holman), Lead Developer at GitHub. They were both confident speakers with fun personalities, who didn't dwell on technical details and focused on ideas and concepts instead.

I thought it would be worth sharing some of our learning. You can find the slides to their presentations below:

@haseman—Mobile Tools for Citizen Journalists [pdf] 7.8MB

@holman—Stories From a Music-Fueled Distributed Streaming Bender (alternate version of his presentation here)

Is social media really that influential to your public sector organisations search rankings? 

In a word, yes. And many commentators across the digital marketing landscape have predicted this merge of social and search and many predict it going even further—check-out Aaron Friedman explain his vision of the future.

Not only is it the case that activity on your organisation's social media profile or page will inevitably drive some traffic to your website, it has also been established that Search Engines now use Social channels as signals when indexing content.

Why is this? Well, anybody who has followed the evolution of how Google, Bing and other search engines index content, will know that providing users with relevant content to the ‘keywords’ entered into the search toolbar is the doctrine of search success.

In the last few years, various changes ('updates' in most people's terms) to the algorithm's that prioritise webpages in the search results have meant that, one of the key mechanics for doing this has been an assessment of the links to and from that web page.

This is under the premise that if one website owner is permanently pointing its visitors to a piece of content on another site via a link, this is a 'recommendation' that verifies the desitnation page as being useful.

Furthermore, if there is clear relevance between aspects of both pages, or if the referring site has a particularly influential profile online (known as PageRank authority—to tick both, think bbc.co.uk/health as an NHS contextual example) this will greatly benefit where that page will be positioned in the SERP (search engine results page).

In essence, content sharing on social media channels is really an extension of this principle, as in many respects social activity largely reflects just another form of user recommendation or linking. However, it has become clear that “social buzz” around a particular webpage receives extra weighting in Google—oh, and Bing of course.

Again, the logic follows that if people are talking about and sharing a piece of content about your organisation it must be both interesting and useful—going back to the fact that the mission of search engines has always been to give users the most relevant content.

This development also seems to make sense as the ‘human aspect’ to social media may go some way towards stamping out some of the bulk link-buying practices that represent the 'darker side' of SEO, which Google’s very latest Panda update has been designed to combat.

In fact, if you happened to catch Google CEO Larry Page’s 2012 update his words on the ‘next-generation of search’ made clear that factoring the individual user into the search results they receive will be the direction for the future.

In a move that blurs the divide between social and search even further ‘Search, plus your world’ will in essence factor in content from a user’s Google+ activity and that of their peers and then feature this at the top end of the SERP for most competitive search queries.

This update has been in existence in the US for a couple of months, but only rolled out across the UK during the last week of April 2012. For many organisations this update means that in principal Google+ will require more attention than it has thus far received, in order to ensure that the right content is featured at the top end of the SERP.

Whether this update will translate into a change of wider web-user habits will remain to be seen—the recent rise in Google+ adoption to a reported 100 million users may provide food for thought on this subject.

Moreover, whether or not this news will have you flocking to set up a Google+ page to compliment your NHS Trust, RSL or Local Government website will depend on your organisation’s attitude towards social media. But the key thing that strikes me about the public sector is that whilst, social media use has become mainstream in the sector for some reason less attention seems to be given to what services are being searched for by stakeholders and how an organisation’s websites are performing against these queries in the SERP.

The good news from this article is that social activity is influencing the aforementioned more and more and so to me this is why it is all the more important for public sector communications to reassess why they want to, or why they are using social media. Then to subsequently define a set of strategic objectives that are integrated with the rest of their online activities and the organisation’s wider communications mix.

Despite the importance of planning your online activities in an integrated fashion, it is incredibly easy to get this horribly wrong—as well as big brands, this post reveals that sometimes this can even include search companies themselves!

Short-termism, for more likes, follows (as the above example reveals!) on social media is most certainly not the right approach, having an integrated approach to all of your communications activities is the key to online success.

If you'd like to speak to us to ensure your digital communications strategy is fully integrated, fill in this form so we can call you for a chat.

This week the VerseOne staff have been discussing their favourite books when they were growing up. As children’s books disappear from the shelves of public libraries for being “inappropriate,” we wondered if any of our well-loved childhood stories would make the cut. Here is a brief bit of nostalgia and a list of what some of the VerseOne staff enjoyed during their youth.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl—James (Marketing Executive): “This story’s overall message is that dreams can come true. Charlie is one of the most important characters in children’s literature. He isn’t lucky, but deserving. The world would be a better place if we all had a bit more of Charlie’s courage, modesty, and innocence.”

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien—Karsten (Web Designer): “Because of the magic, adventure and dragons!”

The Twits by Roald Dahl—Hilda (Graphic Designer): “I always loved Quentin Blake's illustrations and with 3 older sisters, it gave me a few ideas for tricks to play on them.”

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh—Nora (Marketing Manager) loved Harriet’s antics “although reading about how she got caught has given me a lifelong fear of committing anything to writing.”

Through the Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll—Callum (Marketing Executive): “My choice isn’t a book, but a verse. Jabberwocky caught my imagination because it was such brilliant nonsense, and I was definitely a nonsense kind of child. The image of a boy facing off against this monstrous creature really stuck with me.”

The Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones—Chris (Product Manager): “Diana Wynne Jones was a superb and amazingly prolific young persons' author who specialised mainly in sci-fi and fantasy. The book weaves in old legends around the Fair Folk, Lymen and ‘giants’—and the ancient powers of Sun, Moon and Earth that bind them together—into a fascinating, lively, and inventive tale.”

Horrible Histories by Terry Deary—Andrew (Digital Marketing Executive): “From the Groovy Greeks to the Vile Victorians, these books gave me a love of history that led me to study the subject all the way to university. They did this by keeping history entertaining, whilst also providing young inquiring minds with the perspective that life outside modern times—with its conveniences and amenities that are not to be taken for granted—was not quite so rosy. Also filled with practical tips—such as how to build a vicious Viking long boat—I can't help but fear that in a world of health and safety and political correctness gone mad, the banning of these charming books seems all the more plausible!”

This week has been a busy one for @VerseOneComms—with a very well attended Digital Strategy Seminar at Lord's Cricket Ground on Wednesday (write-up coming to the blog soon), as well as trips to visit customers across the UK—from Shropshire to Bristol. 

For our #FunFriday post this week we thought we'd kick-back over lunch and enjoy our five favourite YouTube videos we were told not to miss!

From the amusing to the spectacular, enjoy.

Web in the News

The Metro reported this week that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the internet and author of Weaving the Web, has criticised government proposals to require internet service providers to allow officials to examine electronic communications in real time.

His criticisms are rooted in concerns about privacy and the protection of personal data, as well as the potential for web communications data to be misused:

"It means that there will be information around which could be stolen, which can be acquired through corrupt officials or corrupt operators, and [could be] used, for example, to blackmail people in the government or people in the military.

"We open ourselves out, if we store this information, to it being abused."

Sir Tim is not the only prominent figure to object to the proposals; civil liberties groups and MPs from within the governing party have both raised concerns about the safeguarding of data collected through these channels and questioned the necessity of the proposals. The government believes the measures are necessary to identify and prevent terrorism and other criminal activity.

The web is a curious place: on the one hand, people are remarkably free and open with their personal data, on sites such as Facebook, Foursquare, and LinkedIn: you can often find birthdays, addresses, occupations, and even the current geographical location of a person listed quite publicly—all of which information could be used by fraudsters and burglars. And on the other hand, people are very sensitive about how corporations and the government and security services access and store the exact same personal data—for instance, through the use of cookies online.

These, and others, are issues we in the web space need to help provide solutions for, so that the web remains a method of knowledge-sharing and empowerment without compromising safety.

What accounts for these differences in approach to personal information on the web? Do you think the web is an exceptional means of communication? Or, are there ways in which the government's proposals equate to, for example, requiring the Royal Mail to allow them to read your post—and would you find that more or less intrusive?

by Hilda Allen, VerseOne Graphic Designer

I recently came across two great ideas through TED. The first one that grabbed my attention was the “Unhackathon”.

The Unhackathon was born after Bryan Stevenson’s inspirational talk sparked something in the TED community. Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. Stevenson spoke of the power of identity and the basic challenges of living in a complex world. He believes once ideas are fueled by conviction they can change society, that technology and design have to marry with humanity, justice and compassion to make the world a better place.

After seeing Stevenson’s talk, Christopher Ireland, Mary Anne Masterson and Nathan Shedroff contacted TED with the idea of an “Unhackathon”. The Unhackathon involved 80 designers, technologists and business strategists giving up their Easter weekend to collaborate with strangers. The Unhackathon is where teams work together to better understand the problems of low-income communities and design potential solutions. The main focuses of the Unhackathon was to solve the challenges of economic opportunity and civic identity. (VerseOne participated in something similar for GiveCamp UK.)

A panelist of speakers were set up to speak about the lives, loves and longings of the 57 million Americans living just above the poverty level. After the panel, people formed teams and began to brainstorm ways that technology can help.

24 hours later, 8 teams presented their ideas. The ideas will be posted on http://thecity2.org/splash.php over the next few weeks. TED is offering $10,000 funding grant to the winner to encourage progressive ideas.

After hearing about this TED, I came across a website called Code for America. It was founded by Jennifer Pahlka and she describes it as the “Peace Corps for geeks, only instead of sending people to the third world, we send them to the wilds of City Hall.” Pahlka believes, with the right people, they can show the government what is possible via technology. An example of what they do is the hydrant project. One of her volunteers built an app to let people commit to digging out fire hydrants when it snows in Boston. Only a small project, yet it became viral. Someone in Honolulu adapted to the app to care for tsunami sirens, and in Seattle they are using it to clear storm drains. Pahlka claims that what took Code for America 2.5 months could have cost the government $2 million and would have taken 2 years.

Pahlka's is definitely an interesting TED to watch (and only 12 minutes long).

‘...and give me excess’. Shakespeare said that. Music is universal. And here at VerseOne, it’s not rare to find someone working head down, their headphones in, and the occasional line sung aloud, usually to the individual’s embarrassment.

As part of #MusicforMondays we’ve put together a list of the top ten tracks that have been drifting across the VerseOne office this week, and we think it’s safe to say that it covers most genres. From old school rock, to futuristic house, the music listened to at VerseOne reflects just how varied the staff here are!

In no particular order:                 

1. Kris Kross — Jump

“A fantastically cheesy hip hop tune from the duo famed for wearing their clothes backward. One of those songs that I can’t help but dance around to whenever it comes on! I have also been known to sing along, so no one else can hear of course.”  Callum - Marketing Executive

2. Foo Fighters — The Pretender

“The song has a great feel to it and since I'm a big Foo Fighters fan the fact that it’s more true to their style makes it sound even better. It also helps that I'm trying to write up the chord and drum sheets for it for practice.” Euan – Support

3. The Black Keys — Lonely Boy

“I like it because it’s a foot stomper” From our girl of many words, Hilda – Graphic Designer

4. Bon Jovi — Living on a Prayer

“I chose this track, as it reminds me of riding my bad a** Harley across the US a year or so back for charity, a wonderful feeling...” Alan – CEO

5. Gronk and The Body Doubles — Saw It Coming 

“A shameless plug for this equally shameless power ballad written by my brother, starts as out with delicate guitar and keyboards; with lyrics telling of the loneliness of travelling alone, the song gradually builds up in layers before culminating in a stonking guitar solo and gospel-style choruses” Chris – Product Manager

6.     Fracture & Survival — Tracks Of Time

“Quite simply because I love the sax and drums and the sun is shining!” Getting in the summer mood, with Karsten – Web Designer

7.     Space Dimension Controller — The Love Quadrant

“I'm going for this track as it gets a lot of airtime while I'm working—it’s a futuristic tune that’s pretty relaxed and melodic, yet it’s funky and has also got a beat! Extra points are won by the producer for his ability to stay in galactic character at all times!” Andrew – Digital Marketing Executive

8.     Runrig — Alba

“This is a track that my husband has been playing for about nine days straight now, so I guess that counts as a track I can’t stop listening to!” At the musical mercy of her spouse Nora – Marketing Manager

9.     Adam and The Ants — Stand and Deliver

A huge slice of nostalgic cheese from Nicky – Business Development Manager

10.  Arctic Monkeys — R U Mine?

“I love this track as it is the best one the band has released for years. I can relate to the lyrics, but also appreciate a great indie track, in a time where all mainstream singles are so similar” James – Marketing Executive

Next week the VerseOne Events team will head back to London for the latest installment of VerseOne's Digital Strategy seminars. Taking place at The Home of Cricket (Lord's Cricket Ground), the subjects of online marketing and social media have both proved to be as topical as ever as the session has over 50 delegates set to take part. Amongst the audience—which will contain representatives from the Housing, NHS and Local Government arenas—there will also be some familiar faces present, as a significant portion of bookings have come from people that have attended events with us in the past.

Given this, @VerseOneComms thought we'd put together a post that captures what its like to attend our events first-hand. As our events program has been running for a few years now—rather than turning to the M1/M6 battle-weary veterans—we thought we'd seek the perspectives of the public-speaker (and finger-buffet) loving newbies within the VerseOne Events team.

Below, Callum and James from the Events Team share their respective experiences of their maiden outings to the Housing Hot Topics and NHS Hot Topics sessions that took place at the end of March.

Callum on proceedings at #HousingHT

I arrived at the National Housing Federation's Lion Court Conference Centre not really knowing what to expect from the day. I knew the agenda, who would be speaking and what they would be covering, but not a lot else. Guests starting arriving from about 0950. We directed them into a side room to grab a cup of coffee, a name badge, and a chance for a quick chat with colleagues from the sector, before leading them into the main room ready for Andrew Harris, from Cross Keys Homes to kick things off with a talk on Digital Inclusion, and how it affects those in the Housing Sector.

Andrew presented some very surprising figures, such as 8.2 million people have never been online, of which 4 million are in social housing, and 72% of employers wouldn’t consider interviewing someone without basic IT skills. This was a real eye opener for me – as someone who works with computers every day, I tend to take even the ability to perform a Google search for granted. 

Andrew’s talk really opened my eyes to the challenges that Housing Associations are coming up against when building a digital inclusion strategy. The session also contained some great tips and useful resources for any Housing Associations that are looking to advance the digital inclusion agenda. Andrew also gave some great insights into how Cross Keys Homes have pursued digital inclusion themselves.

If you’d like to access the slides, follow the link at the bottom of the article or let us know in the comments

Following a quick coffee break, and some enthusiastic discussion on digital inclusion, the dynamic Ben Locker was next to present. True to form, Ben set out his talk with a more interactive, workshop feel: armed with a handful of trusty handouts, and some witty one liners, Ben broke down copy writing for the web into its most basic elements, guiding the guests through the pitfalls and common misconceptions around writing copy for a website.

During Ben’s talk he actually came across one of our guest’s tweets via the #HousingHT tag. @BristolJames had recently written a blogpost that highlighted some of the key points that Ben was keen to get across to everyone in the audience. The post in question makes the case why public sector and non-profit organisations need a blog, what content should be covered, and also how to structure and start a blog. It was certainly great to see the audience getting involved in such a topical fashion. Given the highly interactive element, Ben’s talk ended in what seemed like no time at all—although the facts begged to differ, as my head was crammed with fresh information on web copywriting strategy!

After an amazing lunch, we came back into the room for the final part of the day—discussions on Online Media Strategy with Andrew @VerseOneComms and a case study from Anna Lambert, from Halton Housing Trust (HHT) social media being put to good use within a Housing Association. Before I joined VerseOne, Anna had in fact featured at a Digital Strategy seminar in November in Liverpool. It was great for our audience to hear that since then that the @HaltonHousing's twitter account has grown from 1,047 to 1,553 followers under Anna's stewardship. Accordingly, her advice on using social media channels, that also covered the use of Facebook in promoting local community projects, such as the recent launch of 'street snooker'.

With a quick show of hands, during his session Andrew gauged how many guests were on Twitter, and I manned TweetDeck to monitor and respond to the tweets coming in from the discussion, again using the #HousingHT tag. Even Ben Locker joined in, from a train on the way back to Essex! Splitting the guests into groups, things such as which social media to use, and the best way to target an audience were discussed, with some good points being made, and, I think, all parties feeling a little more accepting towards the idea of utilising Social Media at the end.

James' view of #NHSHT

On 23^rd March VerseOne held a Hot Topics event looking at online communications in the NHS. It took place at the fantastic Weetwood Hall in Leeds, who provided excellent service and fine catering to help keep the delegates comfortable throughout the day. 

The event was a great success with delegates benefitting from engaging presentations as well as an interactive session, focusing on social media, in the afternoon. VerseOne created a hash tag on Twitter, #NHSHT, to be used to follow live tweets, so delegates could give live feedback to their organisations about the session.

Presentations in the morning came from Henry Cook of the Care Quality Commission and Fraser Woodward, the Chair of AHCM.  Henry discussed the importance of the CQC’s website and their strategy to increase their brand awareness online. The organisation implemented a new digital strategy in 2010 in order to rectify this. He also made clear what the CQC is trying to achieve as an organisation—focusing on the outcomes of patient care and how it is delivered—and explained their objective that the website become the source for discovering this sort of information.

Meanwhile Fraser’s presentation helped define how NHS organisations should review their online and digital presence. He examined how the sector can improve its websites, offering tips on how to keep content engaging and well written.  He also stressed that it is vital to have your digital strategy more integrated into the whole organisation’s communications and marking strategy.

Karsten Rowe, a VerseOne web designer, presented on the importance of design and branding before lunch. His humorous presentation was well received, with many quips about what makes good and bad web design. Many delegates were receptive to his idea that simplicity is key. Karsten made it clear that when building a new website or intranet, an organisation needs to trust a designer to make their vision happen. Any sort of ‘design by committee’ should be well avoided.

The rest of the day focused on digital marketing and social media in the NHS with an interactive session run by Andrew from @VerseOneComms. This in particular made use of the Twitter hash tag #NHSHT. He asked the delegates to discuss in groups how they are looking to utilise social media, focusing on their target audiences, objectives and which mediums they prefer to use. A couple of groups understood that Facebook is a great way to engage with young people, whilst Twitter is helpful on a more senior and professional level.

There was also a case study on NHS Bradford & Airedale from Rachel Rutherford about how her organisation uses social media. She told us about how @NHSBradford have used Twitter, Facebook and Youtube to run various campaigns. For example, their NHSVDay campaign attracted a huge following as they provided sexual health advice via humorous poetry in the run up to Valentine’s Day. Rachel emphasised that using social media in the NHS is an ever-changing venture, and trusts must be ready to provide resources to manage it properly. She is always looking to progress and be innovative with. 

If you'd like to find out more about the hot topics events or to receive the slides get in touch with us here

Last week @VerseOneComms attended the Social Media World Forum (#SMWF) at London’s Olympia Conference Centre. The agenda was packed with superstar speakers such as Twitter’s UK Sales Director Bruce Daisley, LinkedIn’s Global Marketing Director EMEA Joshua Graff, and David Bailey Communications Manager at Staffordshire Police.

David’s session was particularly fascinating: he discussed how their use of social media had a positive impact in preventing last summer’s riots from proliferating in the area. Follow @Staffspolice if you are looking for a good example of a public sector organisation using Twitter as something more than a one-way broadcast channel for their website.

Of the many memorable soundbites from the day, there’s one that was referenced a few times that we particularly like—and we’ve managed to locate it via the wonders of Google:

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends” Jeff Bezos, CEO at Amazon.com.

This quote echoes the sentiments of public sector social media advocates such as Anna Lambert @HaltonHousing and Rachel Rutherford @NHSBradford, both of whom have featured as guest speakers at VerseOne’s Digital Strategy events.

They believe that conversations on social media will be taking place about your organisation already, whether you like it or not — and that being part of the conversation, gives your organisation the chance to do something about it.

If you are thinking of starting on social media but would like some help, or you'd like to make your existing social media presence more conversational and engaging, click here to find out more about our public sector social media workshops.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Following on from last week's blog, I am now looking at the next Success Criteria listed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

1.2.1: Audio-only and video-only (Pre-recorded)
The rule of thumb is that Content Authors/Editors need to ensure they are offering an equivalent experience for deaf/blind users to that of other users.

So how can you do that?

Well, the simple answer is to start with a verbatim transcript for the audio on the same web page or a link to it on another page. This will enable a deaf person to read it.

That’s all well and good for the audio only, but what about video only, i.e. video with no sound?

This is much more complex and totally depends on the topic of the video. So you will have to make a judgement—is it reasonable to expect you to explain in writing to a blind person what the video is showing?

For instance, imagine a video with no sound showing how to make a cake...obviously everyone would benefit from written instructions. But what about a video which shows you a cuckoo disposing of its adopted siblings? In order to give a blind person an equivalent experience, the explanation could be quite lengthy. Perhaps it would be easier in this case to consider adding a voice-over. Here again, everyone would benefit and you could transcribe the voice-over.

This is all very time-consuming, but bear in mind the word "reasonable". Has your organisation got the resources for this, or do you feel justified in stating "If you are having any difficulty with viewing the video, please contact our..."? Just remember that barrister—the one you could meet in a Court of Law.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

The Equality Act 2010 makes it quite clear that any service provider must by law make sure the service is accessible (which includes web products). Although the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are not law, they have been put in place to help organisations to comply with the law and make their web products accessible.

So I thought it would be a good idea to start looking at some of the success criteria that the Guidelines have set for organisations to follow. We'll start with the very first one—set at Level A compliance—which comes under "Perceivable" (one of the four main guidelines):

Text alternatives—SC 1.1.1: Non-text content
This covers informative/decorative images, controls, media, CAPTCHAs, and sensory experience.

For example...

When it comes to decorative images, web service providers should ensure that any item that is purely decorative (such as non-informative images, formatting, or invisible elements) can be ignored by assistive technology.

In the case of decorative images, they should either be "called" from the CSS, or the HTML alternative text attribute should be set to "null", e.g. (no space between the quotes). I mention this in more detail because so many people either ignore the alternative text, which means the blind user hears the file name, or they put a space between the quotes, which means the blind user knows there is an image there, but doesn't know what it is.

A good content management system, like VerseOne CMS, will make sure a content author gives an image alternative text. But it can't actually help them to make sure the wording is adequate, or determine whether or not an image is decorative. That part is down to the human; provided they have had sufficient training.

To sum up, we need to bear in mind at all times that the aim is to give the impaired user as near an equal experience as possible to that of other users.

February saw another successful social media discussion forum at VerseOne's Digital Strategy seminar in Manchester. Many of the NHS delegates who attended are keen to build further on the ideas raised in NHS Bradford & Airedale's presentation. Accordingly, with our social media workshops fast approaching in March, we thought we'd speak to our social media experts to pick their brains on an area of concern that is frequently raised by NHS Trusts at our events: dealing with complaints.

If you'd like to receive more public-sector-specific advice from our social media experts, you can meet them at one of VerseOne's upcoming social media marketing workshops. Details of the sessions are at the bottom of the page.

React Fast

As social media channels are real-time communications tools, every second counts. The longer a negative comment goes unanswered, frustrations will grow—or, worse still, negative momentum could build quickly, with others within the social community turning against your Trust. 

When it comes to NHS communications, it is often difficult to send a satisfactory response quickly. Before putting any communication out, there are often procedures to follow requiring approvals and sign-offs (this will often mean the involvement of senior management, which can slow things further).

Despite this, it is crucial to let the aggrieved person know that you have heard them. If a full response is not immediately possible, providing acknowledgment of the issue is. Make clear that the matter is being looked into and that it has your organisation's full attention.

Ideally, you should formalise your capability to put out an "interim response" via a protocol that has senior management buy-in so that you can always react quickly.

Human Touch

Although it is important to react quickly to any negativity towards your Trust or organisation, nothing is more frustrating to an aggrieved person than receiving a stock pre-prepared response.

Although there may be a temptation to put out such a generic "interim response", it is important that the patient or member of the public feels that their issue is being taken seriously.

Any response must display sensitivity, empathy and, above all, communicate in a friendly and conversational tone. It is easy for the gloves to come off when a complaint is made against a faceless organisation online as many people percieve the internet as an anonymous forum.

However, social media can provide your organisation with a face and by responding with a human touch you will help take the sting out of most people's frustrations.

Where appropriate, try also to provide a point of contact for discussion to continue offline, as this is a great way to diffuse the potential of an online storm of negativity.

Seeing is believing

It is important to realise that these negative conversations will be happening online whether you are part of them or not. However, a great response can convert an aggreived or upset patient into an advocate for your Trust or the NHS as a whole.

You cannot respond to what you don't see. One of the keys to managing your online reputation is to have an effective monitoring program, so that you are aware of what's being said about you and where it is being said.

Tools such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite will allow you to pick up any mentions of your organisation on Facebook or Twitter—or you can use Google Alerts, an effective way to track mentions of your organisation across blogs and the wider webspace.

The great thing about social media is that you can listen without being seen, so even setting up dormant accounts for a period will allow you to spot wider trends and react strategically before actively engaging through social channels.

Introduction to Social Media

This session will explain how to setup and start using the main social media channels, how to determine which channels are right for your organisation. The session will also provide best practice information on utilising each channel to its full potential, as well as taking a look at some case studies with some good and bad examples of social media use in the uk public sector.

• Manchester, 27th March
• London, 24th April

Advanced Social Media

This session will delve deeper by looking at how each attendee is currently running and maintaining their own social media channels, followed by recommendations and paths of action to optimise current social media activity on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and by blogging all in the public sector context—and how best to fit these activities within a wider online communications strategy.

• Manchester, 28th March
• London, 25th April

Complete this form to receive more information and an outline for the courses

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Did you know that if the source document isn't accessible then the PDF document won't be either?

Organisations are often compelled by law to publish documentation to their target audiences. Many of these documents are very long and were originally prepared in Microsoft Word. Content authors given this task often simply convert the original file to PDF, upload it to the server, and link to it from a web page. Job done!

But not so fast... This is good practice only as long as the resulting PDF is accessible and can be read by assistive technology. Impaired users, such as the blind who use screen-reading software, must also be able to access these documents.

This means that not only must content authors ensure that the content on their website is accessible, but that the linked PDF documents are too.

The process for making a PDF accessible is known as "tagging" and is very similar to the coding process for a web page. Just as the headings, tables, forms, and links on a web page require semantic coding, so do the same elements in a PDF.

This is made much easier if the originating document has been made accessible in the first place. For instance, the 2010 version of Microsoft Word has a built-in accessibility checker.

So organisations who are still using Word 2003/2007 would do well to heed this fact. They should ensure that content authors who are converting Word documents to PDF have access to this latest version of Word, be it on a spare laptop or a single dedicated PC. They can then run the accessibility checker on any source document prior to converting it to a PDF.

Then, provided they use software such as Adobe Acrobat Pro's PDF Maker to convert to PDF, they will be going a long way towards meeting the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

I spend most of my day auditing websites for their level of accessibility and, to be honest, sometimes I find myself groaning out loud. Some of the issues really impact on disabled users, and others are just frustrating.

Here's an example of something that's both. It is an image of text on the home page of a website (names etc changed to avoid blushes).

Impacting on the disabled: Whoever uploaded it added the alternative text for a blind screenreader user explaining what the image portrays—but withheld from them the actual telephone number and email address!

Frustrating: The title attribute (information displayed on screen in the form of a "tooltip") tells a sighted user that the image is displaying an email address!

Well, folks, how many marks would you give them out of 10 for being inclusive? And how many for going to the trouble of adding a superfluous title attribute?

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Will this be the case that makes lax web service providers take notice of their legal responsibilities?

The RNIB have been trying to work with a low cost airline (BMIBaby) since 2010 and, despite RNIB's giving them both a full audit report and recommendations, BMIBaby has still not made any significant progress in making their web services more accessible.

So, finally, the RNIB has now served BMIBaby with legal proceedings as the website remains inaccessible to those using screen readers, or those who cannot use a mouse.

Hugh Huddy, the RNIB Campaigns Officer for Inclusive Society, said: "Blind and partially sighted customers deserve to have access to the best online prices and flight information, just as any customer of BMIBaby does. Why should those with sight loss risk missing out on a web-only deal, or be forced to ring a call centre simply because companies are failing to take accessibility standards seriously?"

Even if this case is settled out of court, it has gone public and therefore will be quoted for many years to come! So for those web service providers who don't worry about making sure their website is inclusive: "Be afraid, be very afraid."

Read the RNIB press release here.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Last week the free email newsletter (E-Access Bulletin) on access to digital technologies by people with disabilities* published the following:

"The UK's largest supermarket chain has said it is taking seriously the concerns raised about the inaccessibility of its new smartphone app, and is to work with the RNIB to improve the situation."

A visually impaired user found that when she went to order her shopping using Tesco's new app, the screen reader on her iPhone said the same thing for every item. This meant that the new app was totally inaccessible for her.

The initial response of Tesco's customer service was to admit that they knew the app was inaccessible, and they were unable to refer the visually impaired user to anyone else within the organisation.

Eventually, after E-Access Bulletin contacted them, Tesco said they were taking the concerns seriously and would need to build and test and amendments to the application, which would take time to complete.

The visually impaired user pointed out that a large organisation couldn't defend themselves by saying they did not have enough resources. She went on to say:

"Ultimately it is a question of leadership. The bottom line is I feel as if I've been treated less favourably for reasons of my disability. It doesn't feel like it's been taken seriously from the top down—it doesn't feel like the decision-maker has taken an inclusive approach, so why should customer service?"

Could the same be said in your organisation? Are the decision-makers aware of the implications of the Equality Act 2010 in relation to services such as websites or mobile phone applications?

*Read the full article by E-access Bulletin, which is published by Headstar: http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=672.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Indirect discrimination is against the law—even if it isn't intentional!

So, I can hear you say, what exactly is "indirect discrimination"?

It is best explained by giving an example:

A legal services provider places a large number of legal documents in portable document format (PDF) on its website. None of the PDFs are able to be read by a screen reader because the text has been saved in graphic format.

Now, let's face it, this company probably isn't aware that they had done anything wrong. However, they have left themselves open should a visually impaired user decide to take action because they cannot access important legal information.

If the legal services company were to be taken to court, they would have to justify why they had committed this offence. Unfortunately for them, a court of law will not accept the argument that the organisation doesn't have sufficient staff to undertake the conversion of these documents.

The moral of this story is that you need to ensure that all your PDFs are accessible. If you realise that some of your legacy documents are not, then you need to take action immediately and at the very least:

• add a statement on your website to ask users to contact you if they experience difficulty accessing any document on your website.

The next thing to do would be to look into training a member of staff to ensure that all your PDFs are accessible. Simply converting a document to PDF does not necessarily make it accessible, as the above example demonstrates.

Act Statutory Code of Practice on services, public functions and associations (PDF 908KB)

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Some well-known companies (I don't feel it would be etiquette to name them) are stating that they will check the accessibility of websites they design against old legislation. Here's an example of wording I came across only this week:

"We'll audit against legislation specific to the countries you operate in. For example, The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 in the UK..."

Unfortunately the DDA has now been replaced by the Equality Act 2010 (EqA) which came into force in October 2010—except in Northern Ireland. So these companies are telling the world that their services are not up-to-date!

This new Act of Parliament, however, is still undergoing changes, and organisations will need to ensure that they are fully aware of this. For example, one of the major updates which was added to the EqA in April 2011 and which affects websites is the Equality Act Statutory Code of Practice on services, public functions and associations (PDF 908KB) and can be found on the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Equality Act section of their site.

Another addition to the EqA is aimed at the public sector and is the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). This section of the EqA replaced the Disability Equality Duty (DED) in April 2011 and guidance for the PSED is also available on the EHRC website.

As this demonstrates, new legislation started to come into force well over a year ago and old legislation such as the DDA and the DED have now been replaced.

We, at VerseOne, pride ourselves on keeping up-to-date in every sense—not just with technology, and we are happy to pass on our knowledge of this new legislation.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

This week's topic is more of a usability issue, although it also affects disabled users.

Whilst many users will be accessing your website from their laptop, mobile, android device or tablet, there are still a lot of users who use a mouse.

The majority of these users will use the middle wheel to scroll through pages and options within dropdown lists, which unfortunately can cause problems.

Have you ever wondered why you can't scroll down on the times when you go to www.thetrainline.com (that is, of course, if you use that website to look up train times)?

Imagine if it was possible to use the scroll button to select a train time...you would immediately run the risk of changing your selected time if you scrolled further down the page in order to click on the [Get times & tickets] button. Now wouldn't that be annoying?

Has this ever happened to you? Have you completed a form on a website and continued to scroll, and then found that the data you selected had changed when you went to submit the form? I frequently come across this when I input my credit card details on e-commerce sites.

Well, having established that allowing a user to scroll through options can cause problems, you need to check that this doesn't happen to your users when they access options on your website. Web designers can design option lists so that selecting an option doesn't adversely affect the user if they continue to scroll.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Some years ago, I used to tell everyone that if you are sending the user to an external website then you should always make the new page open in a new window. Then I started to study accessibility and established that what I used to insist upon was wrong!

The reason for this is that if a blind person (a screen-reader user) clicks on a link that takes them to a new window, they cannot press the Backspace button to return to their previous window. And furthermore, if they close the new window down, they will not be focussed at the point they left the original window. This is why I state that opening links in new browser windows disorientates these users. It can also confuse the cognitively impaired.

In addition to the above, any link that opens in a new window should say so—in other words, the Content Author should not let the user experience any surprises.

The latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) published by W3C WAI state:

3.2.2 On Input: Changing the setting of any user interface component does not automatically cause a change of context unless the user has been advised of the behaviour before using the component. (Level A)

Specific Benefits of Success Criterion 3.2.2:

• This Success Criterion helps users with disabilities by making interactive content more predictable. Unexpected changes of context can be so disorienting for users with visual disabilities or cognitive limitations that they are unable to use the content.
• Individuals who are unable to detect changes of context are less likely to become disoriented while navigating a site. For example:
• Individuals who are blind or have low vision may have difficulty knowing when a visual context change has occurred, such as a new window popping up. In this case, warning users of context changes in advance minimizes confusion when the user discovers that the back button no longer behaves as expected.
• Some individuals with low vision, with reading and intellectual disabilities, and others who have difficulty interpreting visual cues may benefit from additional cues in order to detect changes of context.

Do you feel you can now argue strongly with anyone that your links should not open in a new window?

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

VerseOne regularly runs free seminars on web accessibility all over the country, and during those sessions we cover a wide variety of topics. The presentations are always a huge success, but the feedback from attendees nearly always expresses concern at how little they know about accessibility and how much they have been doing wrong. Much as we'd like to, we can never dwell too long on any one particular subject because of the time constraint. We see our role at these sessions as one of creating awareness. So in this week's blog, I thought I'd go into a little bit more detail about one of the topics we cover briefly in the seminars: captioning.

Captioning, or perhaps I should say "accessible captioning," is not just a case of typing up word-for-word (verbatim) what was said. It is a lot more complicated than that.

Take the simple statement: "You should endeavour to offer as near an equal experience as possible to all your users." Well, let's look at your deaf users viewing your videos. The requirement at single-A conformance for WCAG 2.0 is to add sub-titles (aka captions). However, as the title of this blog suggests, this is an art in itself. For instance, do you know the answer to the following?

• How you describe relevant sound and its source—for example, a phone ringing, a motorbike revving up.
• That a combination of description and onomatopoeia* was the preference of over 56% of surveyed users.
• The recommended speed your users should be expected to read (the presentation rate) to be able to follow the captions. It will generally range from 120-160 words per minute, depending on the target audience and whether the content is theatrical or not.
• That editing of conversations should only be carried out when a caption exceeds a specified presentation rate limit. And that it should maintain both the original meaning, content, and essential vocabulary.
• How you write numbers such as fractions, dates, weights and measurements.
• How you make it clear who is speaking at a given moment.
• What words could confuse non-British audiences.
• That you shouldn't duplicate any words appearing in the video itself in the captions, although you should do so in the transcript.
• That no caption should be on screen for under 2 seconds.

*words that imitate sounds, such as cuckoo, pop, sizzle, and hiss.

If you can't answer the above questions, you might not be offering an equal experience to your deaf users despite going to the effort of adding captions to your videos.

Penny Everett will be giving more practical advice on Accessibility at the upcoming Housing and NHS Hot Topics events that will take place in London and Manchester in October and November.

To view the dates and agendas for these sessions and to reserve your organisation a free place click here.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

There are almost 9 million Britons who have some kind of hearing loss and, of these, 650,000 are profoundly or severely deaf.

If you can spare 30 minutes to watch Evelyn's commentary and demonstrations in her video, it will give you an extremely uplifting experience. She became profoundly deaf at the age of 12 and despite this went on to become a famous musician.

The fact that failing to add captions to your videos will cause you to fail WCAG 2.0 at Single-A conformance means this video is worth looking at to view the captioning alone. It offers captioning in 27 languages (the English version is 100% accurate).

Do you find that people have a very limited view of deafness? Most people have some hearing loss after the age of 60, but don't like to admit it to anyone as they fear there is stigma attached to it.

Have you added any sound to your website in the way of audio or video? How have you catered for your deaf users? Has it caused any problems for you or your website visitors? Did you know you still have responsibility for adding captioning to your videos even if you place them on YouTube?

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Adding synchronised sub-titles (captions) to videos is a requirement of WCAG 2.0 at Single-A compliance, so when Google's speech-recognition technology—which automates sub-titling—was announced, we all gave a sigh of relief. At last, some of us thought, we had an easy way of doing this that would save us loads of time.

Unfortunately, the optimistic few were premature in their celebrations. The following is the result of relying on this technology:

"...and thus podcasts which the contaminate few watch listened to those red faces and the speed at which the put actions form have to be really well teen from about a bus because people don't want to invest anytime you see it."

The video can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4gcf72iGAs and is about the Mobile Oxford University Project. The speaker is Tim Fernando, the Technical Project Manager, and there is nothing wrong with his diction.

Have you had a similar experience?

UPDATE: The owners of this video have now fixed the captioning for it. However, you can still see the results of Google's application in the screen grab and transcription above.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Unlike alternative text, which is added to images for screen-reader users, title text is for sighted users and can be added to both an image and a text link, as well as other web page elements. Provided that you are using one of the main browsers, you will see any title attributes on the web page as tool tips when you roll your mouse over the page element. For example, if you roll your mouse over the following link: The title text attribute you should see the words "also known as a tool tip".

The title text attribute is typically used with the following elements: an image, a button, a text link, and a form control. Its purpose is to provide essential information. It is not generally used if it is felt that the element is self-explanatory and any additional information is unnecessary.

Title text can be read by some of the more modern screen-reading software but is not generally a default setting. Many blind users are unaware that they are able to listen to the title text. Some software will only let the blind user listen to either the title text or the alternative text, but not both. Blind users aren't the only ones who will miss out when it comes to title text—the keyboard-only user will not see a tool tip either. Users who choose to view web pages in text format only will also be unaware whether or not a tool tip has been added to any of the images.

The above creates a problem, in that we should give all users an equal experience. All I can advise is that if you feel it is necessary to add additional information to an element for sighted users, then go ahead. But you must make sure that users who will not see the tool tip are informed of this essential information through other means than via the title text attribute.

One of the worst things you can do with title text is to repeat the alternative text or link text. This means that the blind users who use fully functional screen-reading software, which reads both these attributes to the user, would have to endure listening to both sets of text. I often see websites with elements clearly labelled and the tool tip repeating the same text. This practice is absolutely pointless, as only sighted users can see the tool tip. I recently viewed a web site where all 50 menu item links had repeated the link text in the title attribute.

Are you aware of a website that has done this?

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

An article published not long ago in the Evening Standard talked about Jasmine Gardner's experience using Dragon Naturally Speaking. Jasmine is a journalist, and she had decided to sit back and dictate her articles using this speech-to-text software and was positively expounding the virtues of using such a program.

But before you rush out and buy this type of software, bear in mind that you have to train it to understand your voice. Unfortunately, this may take some time before you can happily sit back like Jasmine and look totally relaxed about the whole thing.

However, I have to say, if you can get past the training hurdle you’ll never look back. But as Jasmine herself says, it's quite an accomplished art to dictate straight to the screen. Somehow hands paused and hovering over a keyboard seems to give you time to think about the next sentence or two, whereas dictating straight from your original thoughts is surprisingly hard to do.

Which brings me back to the fact that this software is also for disabled users. Yes, these programs are becoming easier and easier to use, but like most assistive technology, it takes hard work and patience to become fully conversant with using them. Still, with the way Jasmine is singing its praises, she will probably get more able-bodied people to have a go too.

Do you know anyone who is adept at using Dragon Naturally Speaking?

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

At Christmas this year we will be hitting the third anniversary of the publication of version 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Let’s face it, three years is a very long time in the IT world. So why are some organisations still referring to version 1.0 of these guidelines?

These guidelines are published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which is part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They are there to help organisations to make their websites accessible to as many users as possible. The version 1.0 was originally published in May 1999, which means it was in use for nearly 10 years.

Although it is possible to conform either to WCAG 1.0 or to WCAG 2.0 (or both), the W3C recommends that new and updated content use WCAG 2.0. They also recommend that Web accessibility policies refer to WCAG 2.0.

Following these recommendations through—do we assume that any website still referring to version 1.0 hasn’t updated their website for 3 years?

Is your organisation guilty of this complacency?

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

A CAPTCHA is that funny graphic with squiggly distorted letters which has an accompanying text box where you key-in the letters that you think you can see. You generally see a CAPTCHA before you can continue with a task such as accessing a particular document on a website, or going ahead with a log-in.

The CAPTCHA is produced in such a way that robots which trawl the internet cannot decipher the text and therefore can't infiltrate a website with "spam".

CAPTCHAs are discriminatory in relation to people with a visual or cognitive impairment (particularly dyslexics), as these users find it virtually impossible to interpret the letters presented by the CAPTCHA. Unless the service provider of the website provides an alternative method of accessing this data, other than using a CAPTCHA, the organisation may be guilty of "indirect discrimination".

A CAPTCHA would, however, be acceptable if another accessible method of continuing with the task was offered to the disabled user. Webmasters who include CAPTCHAs on their website often presume they are accessible if they offer an alternative such as "click here for an audio version". This, of course, discriminates against another set of users – particularly the older user who may have a hearing impairment as well as problems with visually deciphering the distorted text.

Have you had problems interpreting the characters in a CAPTCHA?

Have you ever tried to listen to an audio version of a CAPTCHA and given up?

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Did you know that if you are creating a PDF from a Microsoft Word document that the original document needs to be made accessible?

I can’t tell you how many times I have come across PDFs that aren’t accessible and which originally started out as Word documents. The trouble is, making documents accessible relies on busy people knowing some of the slightly more advanced functionality within Word.

For instance, the first step you will need to know is how to use Styles in Word. Then there are ways of writing inclusively for the cognitively impaired (such as those with dyslexia), where use of images to illustrate points is useful. Plus you need to consider use of white space, Plain English, headings, tabs, and so it goes on.

Finally, when the document is finished, you will need to know how to create a TOC (table of contents) if the document is four or more pages in length.

At VerseOne, we have a document which our clients can download that helps them to produce an accessible document. What does your organisation do?

Are you aware of what to do in order to make your Word documents accessible? Or are you one of those very busy people who just haven’t been able to find the time yet? How do you think the “Word” could be spread?

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessiblity Specialist

The five senses of sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing should be joined by balance, pain, temperature, and body position, to name just a few.

Fortunately, when it comes to making a website accessible, we need to concentrate on just three of those senses at the moment: sight, hearing and touch. One day, maybe in the not too distant future, we will be able to download a smell—who knows? In the meantime, we’ll stick with the three senses.

But I can hear you all saying—"What’s touch got to do with it?". Well, in this sense, we are talking about blind people being able to read content using a Braille reader, or feel the outline of a map or image, through a tactile mouse: http://www.economist.com/node/14955359.

How can a web developer, or content author, consider the sense of touch?

Simple: you need to remember that Braille readers output one line at a time. The blind Braille user cannot "hop" to another area of the screen as they need a marker of some sort to do so. So they cannot react to instructions such as: "you will see from the box on the left…" and, in any case, there could be more than one box on the web page. What you should do is give them as much help as possible to locate it, i.e. "As you will observe from the Survey Results box on this page…" and preferably give the box a heading with the same wording.

Do you have any more tips to offer content authors with regard to the sense of touch? Or do you know anyone who uses a Braille reader and has found something really difficult to "read"? Are you aware of any technology related to this sense that has been developed?

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

When I first started working as a Disability Officer at a London university, I hadn’t realised the high proportion of staff who could no longer use a mouse.

In virtually all cases, it was because of repetitive strain injury (aka upper limb disorder or RSI) caused by using a mouse in the first place!

Many of these users had tried to use joy sticks and other alternative pointing devices, but they often reverted back to just using the keyboard to navigate the screen. I used to teach them many of the shortcut keys for commonly-used software, but when it came to navigating web pages, it was a whole new ball game.

Web developers and designers often don’t take into account keyboard-only users, and many content authors and editors are totally unaware of this disability, which falls under the categorisation of "motor impairment".

It really is quite simple to check whether a web page is accessible to keyboard-only users (which also includes blind screen-reader users). All you have to do is to emulate them: just try using only the keyboard yourself.

One of the WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria at Single A Compliance is “No keyboard trap”. This means that the keyboard-only user should not be led into a situation where they can no longer continue to navigate the contents of the page.

If you’re really serious about Web Accessibility, go to your own website, or web page, and try it out! Then try solving any problems you encounter.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Two weeks ago on her Twitter page, Sara Cox (BBC radio DJ) showed how ignorant she was of the needs of the deaf when she moaned about a film that was sub-titled.

I don't think we should totally condemn her. As an Accessibility Web Auditor, I come across people who are totally ignorant of the need to make their web content Accessible. They are normal, caring people. The sort of people who, if they saw a blind person in difficulty, wouldn't hesitate to help them. Yet they have no awareness of the implications of what they are doing when they upload content on the web. They would be mortified if they witnessed first hand how inAccessible their content is to disabled users.

If anyone's to blame, it's society in general who should be taking on board that one in 7 of us has some form of disability. Content Authors and Editors need to be made aware of the Equality Act 2010 and the fact that they should be meeting the requirements of their disabled users. We're not just talking about the deaf or hearing impaired needing sub-titles (or transcripts) for online videos, but also those users who have low vision or are blind, who cannot use a mouse, and the 10% of people who are dyslexic.

More and more administrators are having responsibility for web content added to their job roles. So it follows that more and more organisations should be providing Accessible web content training for their staff.

What do you think? Has the message reached your organisation? Is it top down or bottom up?

Socitm, the professional organisation of ICT policy managers in local government, has surveyed nine NHS trust websites in an extension of its annual Better Connected report on local authority web services.

What they found demonstrates that, although most NHS trusts provide websites for the use of their stakeholders, many trusts have lost sight of the needs of their primary audience of users: patients and their families. Only one of the nine websites surveyed was ranked "Very Good"—the rest were merely "Satisfactory" or, in one notable case, "Dire."

The report notes: "Most of the sites surveyed failed to recognise that the primary audience for a hospital website should always be the patient and/or hospital visitor. But most sites surveyed were trying to be all things to all parties—patients, visitors, staff, strategic partners, GPs, and other NHS bodies."

Failure to cater for this primary audience, according to the report, leads to frustration and confusion as users attempt to navigate to important information (such as visiting hours, appointment management, and infection control) and become tangled in the site's poor architecture and lack of focus.

But there is a solution. The report concludes, "Every website will have a small number of tasks that deliver a huge amount of value to visitors… [Web managers should] focus relentlessly on ensuring that customers can complete their top tasks every time, and only then turn [their] attention to the secondary tasks."

In any website development, the needs of the primary user audience should be paramount; putting the user at the heart of the web experience is what ensures that a site is an effective tool for service provision that delivers a return on investment for both the NHS trust and its patients and stakeholders. And the best way to find out what the user wants is also the most obvious: ask them.

Download the Socitm: Insight report on NHS websites here.

Humans are fallible creatures, especially when trying to predict the future. Nostradamus remains revered in certain circles because his prophecies are extremely vague and compass events in world history. Conversely, there's John Dvorak, the tech writer famous for his lack of the Inner Eye, who once wrote:

The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don't want one of these new fangled devices.

(You can read a selection of his clangers here.)

Predictions about the success or future usefulness of technology tend to go more spectacularly wrong than most, as anyone who invested in a Betamax or a LaserDisc player can attest. And although many of these centre around hardware, there have been more than a few people to foresee the failure, pointlessness, and uselessness of the web, too.

One of the best wrong predictions I've read comes from an otherwise unknown Newsweek journalist called Clifford Stoll, writing in 1995. After two decades on the internet, he says, he's convinced the whole idea is "oversold":

It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community…Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Oops!

I'd like to be fair to Mr Stoll; he's writing 16 years ago, when a lot of us had never heard of email and still hadn't made the transition from tape cassette to CD.

But he really drops the ball on how people would end up using the web. For example:

Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

It's not just the Kindle and the iPad he's failing to imagine; the most well-read and trusted source of news in the world today is a website.

Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later."

If that sounds like an experience you had in the '90s, then you know how much Google has changed our lives. The date of the Battle of Trafalgar? Search returned in 0.59 seconds. First result: Wikipedia telling me the battle took place on 21 October 1805.

Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30.

And yet online behaviour has contributed to the success (or not!) of politicians and governments around the world. Barack Obama, the Arab Spring, Ed Miliband's tweet-up yesterday…although I daresay voters still aren't clamouring to read local politicians' press releases.

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

According to this article, e-commerce contributed approximately 7% of the UK's GDP in 2009. For reference, the NHS budget represents 9%.

Stoll's commentary isn't completely past its sell-by date, however. His views about the web being "an ocean of unedited data…lacking editors" can be found in the words of many a present-day journalist, though equally he's wrong about that data lacking reviewers or critics.

And his encomium to simple, human ("IRL") contact will strike a chord with many who believe, like Stoll, that the web can be as much an alienating force as a socialising one. It remains to be seen whether this is true, but the statistics are against him. Don't believe me? Which activity—long thought to require face-to-face contact—is generating almost $1 billion per year in the United States?

Increasingly, communications and marketing teams that we're speaking to in the public sector are being tasked with writing a digital communications strategy for their organisation.

At VerseOne's free Digital Strategy Seminars last week, Nora Harris provided some great insights and much useful information for delegates to take away to help them put together a strategy that is effective and, more importantly, aligned with their wider communications objectives. Nora began by emphasizing that VerseOne's Information Architecture Process can be applied to great effect when beginning this task.

Define your objectives

Before beginning your digital activity, you must have clearly defined objectives, so that you will have an idea of what constitutes success.

There are many benefits an integrated digital strategy can bring—driving more traffic to your website, raising brand awareness, improving SEO—and although priorities will vary for each organisation, they must be clearly laid out in order to measure the effectiveness of your activities.

Profile your audience

Decide who your target groups are, identify the digital channels where their conversations take place, listen first, make a list of what's being talked about, follow people. Then begin to share and comment. Become a source of information that is relevant to your audience, where your audience congregates.

Measure success

Having defined your aims clearly, you can estimate timescales and expected achievements to provide a benchmark for eventual realised benefits.

There is also a wealth of tools to help you analyse your metrics:

• Google Analytics will let you track your website performance and help you measure ROI
• HootSuite will help you to track results and measure success in real time
• BoardReader will let you find out what's being said about you on forums and message boards
• Alexa Rankings will allow you to measure the influence of any commentator or blogger that may have commented on your organisation

Then develop and adjust your strategy and tactics accordingly, and don't be afraid to experiment.

Integrate online and offline

Nora eloquently explained the importance of getting this right, given the way internet users' perspectives have changed over the years:

"The online landscape has changed. Web users want to be able to contribute, engage and share; they want to be part of a genuine conversation, not part of a 'receive-only' audience. They also expect to have access to interesting and useful information, rather than a wall of corporate marketing material."—Nora Harris, Information Architect

This is excellent advice; however, many of the public sector organisations we have spoken to—given the service-oriented nature of their websites—have also raised the question of how to generate interactive and engaging content online. This is where it is useful to realize that as well as activity online, a well-executed event or forum offline can not only generate some useful content for your online channels, but lead to further engagement in the digital space.

Of course, this demand for interaction and useful content is not just limited to the web! And so our roving Tweeter, @VerseOneComms, was keen to find out how well the content and format of the Digital Strategy Seminars would be received. We live-tweeted the seminars with the hashtag #v1tech; as well as receiving a lot of retweets and comments during the session, we found the number of our Twitter followers increased by 357% over the course of the week—simply due to the fact that we provided people with some useful and interesting content that captured the attention of our target audience.

We would like to thank everyone who contributed, engaged, and tweeted during the sessions.

Because we've integrated digital media with our general communications strategy, we also gathered traditional feedback from delegates:

"Very useful day, good info, interesting presentations."—Katherine Gray, Leeds City Council

"The event was fantastic, thank you very much."—Carly Farley, Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust

Thus, as well as providing our delegates with some strategic tips when it comes to online engagement, hopefully the impact that the offline events had in the digital space can inspire our public sector audience to embrace online channels to extend the reach of their other PR or marketing activites, as the two can most certainly be mutually beneficial.

Feedback for our guest speakers was also extremely positive and we'd like to thank:

Digital Strategy Seminars:

• Mark Parry, Porchlight
• Mike Teasdale, Harvest Digital
• Daniel Nolan, theEword
• Steve Downes, Juice Digital

Hot Topics in the NHS: Digital Communications Strategy for the NHS

• Rob McNair, mycleveragency
• Guy Levine, Return on Digital
• David Fatscher, British Standards Institution

...for their excellent contributions.

If you would like to find out the full details of all of the presentations, click here to register for a copy of the slides.

If you were at one of last week's digital strategy events, please feel free to leave a comment below—we'd love to hear from you.

Clay Shirky is one of the world's foremost experts on internet technology: how it works, and how it affects individuals, groups, and social and economic interaction. He's written a number of books on the topic, including the best-selling Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations.

I recently ran across one of Shirky's older articles, "Communities, Audiences, and Scale", in which he ruminates about the differences between an audience and a community, and what role the web has to play in creating and maintaining them:

Prior to the internet, the differences in communication between community and audience was largely enforced by media -- telephones were good for one-to-one conversations but bad for reaching large numbers quickly, while TV had the inverse set of characteristics. The internet bridged that divide, by providing a single medium that could be used to address either communities or audiences. Email can be used for conversations or broadcast, usenet newsgroups can support either group conversation or the broadcast of common documents, and so on. Most recently the rise of software for "The Writable Web", principally weblogs, is adding two-way features to the Web's largely one-way publishing model.

With such software, the obvious question is "Can we get the best of both worlds? Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a single community?" The answer seems to be "No."

Communities are different than audiences in fundamental human ways, not merely technological ones. You cannot simply transform an audience into a community with technology, because they assume very different relationships between the sender and receiver of messages.

He goes on to make the point that as a community grows, the connections between each of its members become weaker, so that eventually the community (characterised by many-to-many interaction) becomes an audience, where communication is almost exclusively one-way: from the centre to the edge of the group.

Shirky goes on to point out that:

It's significant that the only two examples we have of truly massive community spread of messages on the internet -- email hoaxes and Outlook viruses -- rely on disabling the users' disinclination to forward widely, either by a social or technological trick. When something like All Your Base or OddTodd bursts on the scene, the moment of its arrival comes not when it spreads laterally from community to community, but when that lateral spread attracts the attention of a media outlet.

What he didn't foresee when writing this article in 2002 was that, very quickly, this situation would change. These days, the major media outlets pick up on internet phenomena after they go viral—that is to say, after they have already achieved widespread exposure to communities and audiences on the web.

Or maybe he did. A major theme in Here Comes Everybody is that communities on the web are as likely to be situational as they are to be permanent, and that they grow and disperse with the same life cycle as the topics around which they are centred. What does this mean for organisations that want to make social media a part of their web strategy? Most fundamentally, it means that if they want to create communities around their content, rather than a large, passive audience, they need to keep their content fresh, up-to-date, and topical.

As Dr Kelly Page pointed out at VerseOne's Customer Day last October, the web moves quickly. People will be more likely to engage with an organisation on the web if it keeps up with what they find important at a given moment. This is the essence of social media, and shows how important the many-to-many conversational model has become as the web has evolved.

Following on from yesterday's event Hot Topics in Housing: 'Delivering Winning Online Services,' VerseOne will be hosting a series of blog discussions related to the practical aspects of delivering online services in the housing sector.

Our goal is for these blog discussions to be contributor-driven, and we are inviting comments from members of the housing sector here. Some of the particular topics raised at yesterday's event were: methods for driving tenants to landlord websites; practical suggestions for satisfying the framework of the regulatory bodies; identifying examples of best practice in online service delivery; and deploying social media. VerseOne will begin by researching these topics and will address them in further blog posts.

This list is not exhaustive by any means, however, and we invite you to suggest further topics for discussion and sources of useful information in the comments of this post.

Communication and consultation are key aspects of delivering top-quality services, and commenters are also urged to share suggestions, links, and other relevant material with one another. VerseOne hopes to use this forum-style discussion as a springboard for future round-table events designed specifically to address the concerns of the housing sector and to facilitate interaction and communication among housing providers.

Please note: You must be logged in to leave a comment. Click here to log in or register on verseone.com.

Have you ever wondered why counterfeiters expend so much time and energy in creating fake money, when it would be easier and less risky to earn the money legitimately?

I often wonder something similar about search engine optimisation (SEO). 'Black hat' SEOs employ complex tricks and underhand work-arounds to make sure their clients' websites appear high in a list of relevant search results—and, like counterfeiting, these techniques are time-consuming, expensive, and heavily frowned-upon. Websites that use 'black hat' SEO techniques can end up being banned from the very search engines they're trying to utilise. Why go to such trouble when the legitimate way is easier and more effective?

And it turns out that the best way for a site to achieve search engine optimisation is for it to be Accessible. A List Apart (a highly valued resource here at VerseOne!) addresses this very point:

After reading for weeks and painstakingly editing my personal website to comply with most W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, I have come to a startling revelation: high accessibility overlaps heavily with effective white hat SEO.

On further reflection, this overlap makes sense. The goal of accessibility is to make web content accessible to as many people as possible, including those who experience that content under technical, physical, or other constraints. It may be useful to think of search engines as users with substantial constraints: they can’t read text in images, can’t interpret JavaScript or applets, and can’t “view” many other kinds of multimedia content. These are the types of problems that accessibility is supposed to solve in the first place.

The author, Andy Hagans, goes on to describe some of the WAI Guidelines' Priority 1 Checkpoints and how each one also enhances search engine friendliness—all of which is well worth reading. He points out in his conclusion:

Of course, to most web designers, the goal of accessibility is (and should be) to make sites accessible to all people, independent of their platform or any disabilities they have. But if accessibility gets a website more traffic from Google, even better!

The good news is that a web designer who follows best practices for accessibility is already practicing solid white hat SEO. Search engines need not scare anyone. When in doubt, design your site to be accessible to blind and deaf users as well as those who view websites via text-only browsers, and SEO will fall into place.

VerseOne prioritises Accessibility, providing seminars and training courses on its different aspects, but we also know that websites have to be visited to be effective. It is good to read that other web experts agree: legitimate search engine optimisation and Accessibility techniques work hand in hand, and ensuring a website is Accessible brings extra rewards. Optimising your website via Accessibility truly <i>is</i> easier and achieves the best results.

Copywriting is one of the most often overlooked aspects of website building, and yet it is also one of the most crucial aspects of it. After all, most of the information that you want to deliver to your clients is encapsulated in the text of your website—if they don't read it, then your website is not going to be of much use.

In our free Building An Effective Website seminars, we concentrate heavily on the quality of copy—all too often, clients forget about it until the last minute (it's easy to do amongst the hurly-burly of organising staff, approving designs and harrying IT companies!)—and the text on the website is quickly ripped from policy documents, official communications and other unsuitable places.

Not only can this lead to your site breaching Accessibility rules—the guidelines surrounding which I shall deal with in another post—but it can lead to the utterly fatal trait of your copy being incredibly boring to read.

This tendency to write meaningless stuff (often for managers rather than the website audience) is addressed by online magazine A List Apart, in an article titled Attack Of The Zombie Copy.

You’ve seen them around the web, these zombie sentences. They’re not hard to recognize: syntax slack and drooling, clauses empty of everything but a terrible hunger for human brains:

Leveraging world class infrastructure strengths, mature quality processes and industry benchmarked people management practices…

Findings are recorded in a carefully architected summary that crystallizes the intent of the nation to increase its innovation capacity in a variety of modern economic scenarios…

Indigenous and proven career management tools coupled with a comprehensive series of integrated initiatives have been evolved, to ensure that employees continue to sustain a high performance culture, while recruitment and selection is based on necessary competencies…

It’s a partnering-with-partners strategy…

We've all seen writing much like the above example, haven't we? Does anyone really read it? Of course, for many of us, there are certain buzz- words and phrases that need to be mentioned in order to be taken seriously, but these should be as rare as hen's teeth and, if possible, embedded within a welter of more interesting, lively copy.

Is your website like this? If so, Attack Of The Zombie Copy does have a formula for dealing with it.

Prominent undead expert Dr. Herbert West, of Miskatonic University, suggests the following course of action if you’re attacked by zombie content:

1. Kill the modifiers. This is machete work, so wrap a bandanna around your face and grab some shop goggles. No reader is going to believe that your process is innovative or your product is world-class just because you say so, so kill those adjectives. Don’t feel sorry for them. They have no feelings.
2. Determine what manner of monster you’re dealing with. Once you’ve cleared the modifiers away, you’ll be able to get a better idea of the real shape of what’s underneath. If you can paraphrase the revealed sentence in a simpler way, the paraphrase can guide you to a new, clearer version.
3. Hit ’em in the head, right between the eyes. Once the sentences’ underlying form has been revealed, you’ll be able to start looking at the overall health of paragraphs and pages. You may find that whacking the modifiers and simplifying the sentences will reveal a mushy glop of circular logic and nonsense; if so, it’s time to deliver a merciful death. If, on the other hand, your copy is only mostly dead, you can revive it by excising meaningless or redundant passages and then patching up the remainder with transitions and clarifications.

It's worth reading the rest of the article, as the author demonstrates how much better and—yes—more meaningful the amended text is. So, take out your chainsaw and start lopping the loose limbs from those zombie sentences—everyone will benefit!

As someone who has used many applications across the entire spectrum of computing tasks, I maintain a healthy interest in user interface design—especially as it has applications to my real world job in which, surprise surprise, I am currently tasked with overhauling the entire user interface of our product range.

As such, I found this article to be particularly useful in outlining the principles involved in establishing good practice throughout application design...

1. Tips and Techniques

The following tips and techniques that I have learned over the years should prove valuable:

1. Consistency, consistency, consistency. I believe the most important thing you can possibly do is ensure your user interface works consistently. If you can double-click on items in one list and have something happen, then you should be able to double-click on items in any other list and have the same sort of thing happen. Put your buttons in consistent places on all your windows, use the same wording in labels and messages, and use a consistent color scheme throughout. Consistency in your user interface enables your users to build an accurate mental model of the way it works, and accurate mental models lead to lower training and support costs.
2. Set standards and stick to them. The only way you can ensure consistency within your application is to set user interface design standards, and then stick to them.  You should follow Agile Modeling (AM)’s Apply Modeling Standards practice in all aspects of software development, including user interface design.
3. Be prepared to hold the line. When you are developing the user interface for your system you will discover that your stakeholders often have some unusual ideas as to how the user interface should be developed.  You should definitely listen to these ideas but you also need to make your stakeholders aware of your corporate UI standards and the need to conform to them. 
4. Explain the rules. Your users need to know how to work with the application you built for them. When an application works consistently, it means you only have to explain the rules once. This is a lot easier than explaining in detail exactly how to use each feature in an application step-by-step.
5. Navigation between major user interface items is important. If it is difficult to get from one screen to another, then your users will quickly become frustrated and give up. When the flow between screens matches the flow of the work the user is trying to accomplish, then your application will make sense to your users. Because different users work in different ways, your system needs to be flexible enough to support their various approaches. User interface-flow diagrams should optionally be developed to further your understanding of the flow of your user interface.
6. Navigation within a screen is important. In Western societies, people read left to right and top to bottom. Because people are used to this, should you design screens that are also organized left to right and top to bottom when designing a user interface for people from this culture? You want to organize navigation between widgets on your screen in a manner users will find familiar to them.
7. Word your messages and labels effectively. The text you display on your screens is a primary source of information for your users. If your text is worded poorly, then your interface will be perceived poorly by your users. Using full words and sentences, as opposed to abbreviations and codes, makes your text easier to understand.  Your messages should be worded positively, imply that the user is in control, and provide insight into how to use the application properly. For example, which message do you find more appealing “You have input the wrong information” or “An account number should be eight digits in length.” Furthermore, your messages should be worded consistently and displayed in a consistent place on the screen. Although the messages “The person’s first name must be input” and “An account number should be input” are separately worded well, together they are inconsistent. In light of the first message, a better wording of the second message would be “The account number must be input” to make the two messages consistent.
8. Understand the UI widgets. You should use the right widget for the right task, helping to increase the consistency in your application and probably making it easier to build the application in the first place. The only way you can learn how to use widgets properly is to read and understand the user-interface standards and guidelines your organization has adopted.
9. Look at other applications with a grain of salt. Unless you know another application has been verified to follow the user interface-standards and guidelines of your organization, don’t assume the application is doing things right. Although looking at the work of others to get ideas is always a good idea, until you know how to distinguish between good user interface design and bad user interface design, you must be careful. Too many developers make the mistake of imitating the user interface of poorly designed software.
10. Use color appropriately. Color should be used sparingly in your applications and, if you do use it, you must also use a secondary indicator. The problem is that some of your users may be color blind and if you are using color to highlight something on a screen, then you need to do something else to make it stand out if you want these people to notice it. You also want to use colors in your application consistently, so you have a common look and feel throughout your application.
11. Follow the contrast rule. If you are going to use color in your application, you need to ensure that your screens are still readable. The best way to do this is to follow the contrast rule: Use dark text on light backgrounds and light text on dark backgrounds. Reading blue text on a white background is easy, but reading blue text on a red background is difficult. The problem is not enough contrast exists between blue and red to make it easy to read, whereas there is a lot of contrast between blue and white.
12. Align fields effectively. When a screen has more than one editing field, you want to organize the fields in a way that is both visually appealing and efficient. I have always found the best way to do so is to left-justify edit fields: in other words, make the left-hand side of each edit field line up in a straight line, one over the other. The corresponding labels should be right-justified and placed immediately beside the field. This is a clean and efficient way to organize the fields on a screen.
13. Expect your users to make mistakes. How many times have you accidentally deleted some text in one of your files or in the file itself? Were you able to recover from these mistakes or were you forced to redo hours, or even days, of work? The reality is that to err is human, so you should design your user interface to recover from mistakes made by your users. 
14. Justify data appropriately. For columns of data, common practice is to right-justify integers, decimal align floating-point numbers, and to left-justify strings.
15. Your design should be intuitable. In other words, if your users don’t know how to use your software, they should be able to determine how to use it by making educated guesses. Even when the guesses are wrong, your system should provide reasonable results from which your users can readily understand and ideally learn.
16. Don’t create busy user interfaces. Crowded screens are difficult to understand and, hence, are difficult to use. Experimental results show that the overall density of the screen should not exceed 40 percent, whereas local density within groupings should not exceed 62 percent.
17. Group things effectively. Items that are logically connected should be grouped together on the screen to communicate they are connected, whereas items that have nothing to do with each other should be separated. You can use white space between collections of items to group them and/or you can put boxes around them to accomplish the same thing.
18. Take an evolutionary approach.  Techniques such as user interface prototyping and Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) are critical to your success as a developer.

2. UI Design Principles

Let’s start with the fundamentals of user interface design. Constantine and Lockwood describe a collection of principles for improving the quality of your user interface design. These principles are

1. The structure principle. Your design should organize the user interface purposefully, in meaningful and useful ways based on clear, consistent models that are apparent and recognizable to users, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, differentiating dissimilar things and making similar things resemble one another. The structure principle is concerned with your overall user interface architecture.
2. The simplicity principle. Your design should make simple, common tasks simple to do, communicating clearly and simply in the user’s own language, and providing good shortcuts that are meaningfully related to longer procedures.
3. The visibility principle. Your design should keep all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information. Good designs don’t overwhelm users with too many alternatives or confuse them with unneeded information.
4. The feedback principle. Your design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes of state or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to the user through clear, concise, and unambiguous language familiar to users.
5. The tolerance principle. Your design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions reasonable.
6. The reuse principle. Your design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember.

As the author concludes, the user interface—which includes aesthetics, process and workflow—can make or break an application. An application that is difficult to use will not be used. Full stop.

My real world job involves building systems that are imposed upon the staff of the organisation from above—but, although these staff members are not buying the product directly, the principle is the same. Because if they do not buy into the software systems, then they won't use them; if they don't use the system, the success score of the managers will fail.

For those of us who design websites with Accessibility in mind, the question of fluidity—that is, the resizing of the site to accommodate differing screen resolutions—is a vexing question.

Should we design for a fixed width? Or should we design for flexible widths, or a totally fluid width? And if we do a fluid with, how do we ensure that the site maintains its look and feel at different screen resolutions and, indeed, at different text sizes?

This article at A List Apart describes how it might be done: by making the elements proportional to each other, rather than fixed.

Instead of exploring the benefits of flexible web design, we rely on a little white lie: “minimum screen resolution.” These three words contain a powerful magic, under the cover of which we churn out fixed-width layout after fixed-width layout, perhaps revisiting a design every few years to “bump up” the width once it’s judged safe enough to do so. “Minimum screen resolution” lets us design for a contrived subset of users who see our design as god and Photoshop intended. These users always browse with a maximized 1024×768 window, and are never running, say, an OLPC laptop, or looking at the web with a monitor that’s more than four years old. If a user doesn’t meet the requirements of “minimum screen resolution,” well, then, it’s the scrollbar for them, isn’t it?

Of course, when I was coding the site, I didn’t have the luxury of writing a diatribe on the evils of fixed-width design. Instead, I was left with a sobering fact: while we’d designed a rather complex grid to serve the client’s content needs, the client—and by extension, the client’s users—was asking for a fluid layout. As almost all of the grid-based designs I could list off at that time were rigidly fixed-width, I was left with a prickly question: how do you create a fluid grid?

As it turns out, it’s simply a matter of context.

I do suggest reading the whole article—it lays out, in the form of a sample tutorial, precisely the best way to ensure the maintenance of form and look in a fluid world.

Via Daring Fireball, I have found this rather excellent article on the compliance modes of IE8.

If you’re a web developer, you’ll already know that Internet Explorer 8 (Final) was released to the public recently, and with it comes the “X-UA-Compatible” header, a mechanic that the IE Team devised as their way of “not breaking the Web”.

Uh-oh. This sounds like another Microsoft (M$, in developer parlance) hash-up...

Let’s start from the top: the X-UA-Compatible header, which can be set as both an HTTP-level header or as a <meta> tag inside your HTML document, allows you to specify which rendering engine you want IE8 to use; setting it to IE=EmulateIE7 will tell IE8 to use the IE7 rendering engine; setting it to IE=8 will enforce the IE8 Standards Mode engine. It is designed to be forward-compatible, so a hypothetical IE9 will support it, as will an IE10, and so forth. If you want to simply enforce the latest and greatest engine in all current and future versions of IE, you can set the X-UA-Compatible header to IE=Edge, which is the instruction to “always use the most cutting edge engine available”.

Yep, it definitely is another M$ hash-up. Why could M$ not simply get IE8 to render standard-compliant code?—just like every other browser (for more discussion on what this means, see my previous article).

Just as examples, here are both the HTTP and the <meta> tag ways of setting X-UA-Compatible:

HTTP: Header set X-UA-Compatible "IE=8"

Meta: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

Nope. In true M$ style, their solution is to force developers to add more extraneous code to webpages in order to make their products work properly.

There is a lot more detail to this, so do feel free to read the article if you are a developer. If you aren't a developer, then I suggest that you skip it: the nice people who develop sites will ensure that you don't have to worry about a thing...

As some of you may know, web developers do not like Internet Explorer (often known, in the industry, as Internet Exploder). There are several reasons for this, but the most common—and annoying—is the rendering engine. To explain what this means requires that I go into a little technical detail...

Web pages are essentially made up of two types of code: HTML (HyperText Mark-Up Language)—which dictates the actual structure and content of the page (it is this that screen-readers see)—and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The latter dictates the actual appearance of the page—the colours used, the width of columns, the positioning of elements, etc.

A web browser (of which Internet Explorer is just one of many) uses a set of definition libraries to decide how it is going to render website code. These libraries make up the "rendering engine" (sometimes "layout engine"), and different browsers use different rendering engines.

There are four main rendering engines.

• Gecko—an open source engine developed by the Mozilla Foundation and used by Firefox and a clutch of other browsers, e.g. Flock and Camino.
• Webkit—based on KHTML and an Apple-sponsored, open source rendering engine and by far the most advanced as far as CSS capabilities are concerned. It is used by Safari, Chrome and other (mainly Mac-based) browsers, such as Cruz, Stainless and Shiira.
• Presto—a proprietory engine used by Opera.
• Trident—a proprietory engine used by Internet Explorer (IE).

Unfortunately, it becomes a little more complicated than this since, like most software, there are different editions of each engine, and they display webpages according to slightly different rules—especially in regards to the CSS.

In the case of Gecko, Webkit and Presto, these differences are not huge. And the actual differences between the three rendering engines themselves are actually quite small. This is because, despite having one or two quirks, they broadly render code as per the rules laid down by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C).

This is important because the CSS not only makes the page look pretty—it determines the positioning of the elements on the page. Write bad CSS and you could find that links cannot be clicked, logos are only partially displayed, or columns have dropped down below each other rather than being side-by-side. So, the CSS has to be properly tested and bug-fixed, and this can take a considerable amount of time.

Trident—and thus IE—is a complete nightmare in this regard: it is, generally, very bad at rendering CSS properly, and has a number of random rendering bugs. In some cases, the desired look cannot be achieved at all in IE, and a simplified layout must be used instead.

To add to the confusion, the differences between the various editions of Trident—and thus various editions of IE—are pretty wide.

In other words, IE6 and IE7 render pages differently and so need to be bug-fixed individually.

Luckily, IE has a device—known as Conditional Comments—that allows coders to target fixes at the type of IE being used, else web development would be severely curtailed.

As such, developers generally build webpages to W3C standards—wich means that the page will render correctly in Webkit, Gecko and Presto based browsers—and then apply the fixes for the IE bugs.

Regardless of this, fixing code for IE will, typically, almost double the amount of time required to build a page template. Obviously, this costs you—the customer—more money. You are having to pay for the fact that Microsoft cannot be bothered to patch older versions of IE.

Now, in a fit of rebellion, many developers are now joining campaigns—such as those being run by I Dropped IE6, Too Cool for IE, and .Net magazine, and even (though less explicitly) by Google—to boycott IE6 by refusing to fix display bugs for that browser.

 Unfortunately, many people are still using IE6—especially in the public sector. Indeed, Connecting for Health—the organisation driving the NHS "Spine" document digitisation project—recommends using an unpatched IE6 (which, incidentally, has massive security flaws). Part of the issue here is that CfH is unsure whether the vastly expensive software that it has installed will actually work with IE7.

As such, at VerseOne we are required to continue supporting IE6 and IE7. And, in a couple of months, Microsoft will release IE8 officially (betas and release candidates have been doing the rounds for about a year now) and we will have to support that too. (IE8 comes with a set of unique problems all of its own, which I shall discuss in another article.)

IE6 is an old browser (very, very old in technology terms), having been released in 2001 and, whilst we continue to support its graphical quirks, we really recommend that you upgrade to IE7 (it's free), at the very least. Not least because it is a lot more secure.

Of course, if you want an even better web experience, download one of the other browsers listed earlier in the article—they, too, are all free and they are usually more secure and more efficient than IE. If you are on Windows, you essentially have a choice of Chrome, Firefox or Safari (we Mac users, as with most software these days, have rather more options).

Regardless, when the world finally stops using IE6, we shall throw a massive party and we sincerely hope that you will join us...

There's an interesting article over at A List Apart—many web designers' online magazine of choice—about defining goals when designing websites.

Creativity breathes life into successful websites. However, creative ideas and solutions can sometimes seem like guesswork—and guessing is risky business. So what can designers do to show clients they’re using a solid strategy and have the best intentions?

The article lays out some key tips for ensuring that your site deploys design in order to achieve key objectives.

At this point, I feel that I should clarify exactly what "design" is—at least in my own definition.

• Design is not solely about making things pretty just for the sake of it (although that is part of it); making pretty things for the sake of it is called "art".
• Design is about making art serve a purpose: design is about persuading a user to perform some action.
• In the case of a theatre show poster (where I started my career), you want the user to:
  • notice the poster (particularly tricky during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe!), and
  • buy a ticket to see the show.
• In the case of a website, you want the user to take in the presented information; for instance, you may want them to:
  • read your articles and recommend them to others,
  • browse a product catalogue and to buy items from it,
  • use online services to report faults, make payments, etc.

So, design is about using creativity to direct users to undertake certain actions.

When designing websites, there are many tools available to achieve this, including—but most definitely not limited to—good use of typefaces, using space (or moving images, etc.) to direct people's attention to certain areas, structuring menu items so that they have a logical narrative, etc.

However, a client needs to know that the designer shares the same goals as they do. That is, the client needs to know that the website design is going to persuade the user to undertake the tasks that the client wants, not what the designer thinks that they should be.

This requires a large degree of communication between client and designer. If the client does not communicate what the goals should be, then the designer has no option but to guess what the goals should be: if the designer does not listen to the client, then the website will not achieve the client's aims and they will be very unhappy with the designer.

So, both designer and client need to define, very clearly, and to understand what the goals are. Some of these tips might help to do this.

A modified acceptance criteria exercise is the simplest and most effective tool I’ve found for setting clear and powerful goals. Agile developers use acceptance criteria to demonstrate why tasks need to happen and define how they fit into the big picture. With a few tweaks, it works perfectly for capturing design goals.

Example request:

• We’re redesigning our website because we need more traffic and an updated look, and want to become more respected in our industry.

Example goal template:

• We want to __________ because ____________ so that ___________.

Example goals:

• We want to increase traffic by 20% because we need more exposure so that we can generate eight more leads per month.
• We want to update to a current look because we need to be more relevant to our customers so that we can raise our rates by 10%.
• We want to write four industry-related articles per month because we want to help our industry so that we can form two partnerships per month.

Notice how separating “the means,” “the reason,” and “the ends” clarifies the project owner’s goals and describes why they want them and how they intend to achieve them. Acceptance criteria for design is a great way to flush out deeper, possibly unknown, intentions that will help the designer and project owner make better decisions and dodge surprises later in the process. Revise the goals until all parties agree on them and understand them.

Bonus points: Create several goals so that you can capture secondary and tertiary goals, but don’t let it get out of hand—no single website should have more than a handful of high-level goals.

The article is worth reading in full, especially because large parts of it—expecially the "area mapping" exercises—relate closely to my previous piece about information architecture. Do go and have a look—whether you are a designer or a commissioner.

Drop-down and pop-up menus have always been a problem from a Web Accessibility point of view, but now internet guru Jeffrey Zeldman argues that drop-down menus are, in and of themselves, almost always a bad option—and not simply because they impact on a website's useability.

Now, me, I hate drop-down menus. I hate them as a user. Too many choices. It’s like those big laminated menus you get at a New York diner. Spaghetti, diet plate, French Toast, broiled filet of sole, pizza, ice cream sundae, Atkins menu, veggie burger.... The eyes blur. You slam the menu shut and order coffee.

As a designer, wherever possible, I avoid drop-down menus. For they almost always create an inferior user experience versus drilling down through clearly labeled, intelligently organized categories.

As Zeldman points out though, drop-down menus betray a failure to think properly about a site's structure: in other words, they indicate a failure to consider navigation from a user's perspective.

When I see a drop-down menu, I know that a committee sat around a table, unwilling to think through the organization of the site’s material into a user-focused structure — or unwilling to accept the recommendation of an information architect who spent days making sense of the site’s offerings.

A drop-down menu tells me there were too many decision makers, none of whom understood that the user’s needs were more important than their ego-driven desire to win front-page placement for their little piece of the content puzzle.

In other words, all too often, clients are more concerned about protecting their own turf—the so-called "silo mentality"—than they are about ensuring that their customers are able to find the information that they need. This is not a minor quibble: it is absolutely fundamental to website design.

Your website exists in order to deliver information to people; and this is not an Accessbility issue, as such: it is an issue for any organisation that really wants to deliver the best online experience to its customers.

All too often, websites are designed by committee, despite the increasing numbers of specifications demanding "information architecture consultancy". As Zeldman says...

I look forward to the day when most people who hire folks like us to design, structure, and program their web presences treat us more like the thinkers we are, and less like hired hands installing birdbaths.

When that day comes, websites will become rather easier to navigate than at present. At the company were I work, we are attempting to introduce some novel techniques which will help website users to find the information that they need—but we are also helping clients to understand how to build and maintain their site to achieve the same ends.