Chapter and Verse Blog

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.

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.

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

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.

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.