Providing accessible digital solutions for our users at the University of Bristol
Recently, we received a support request to include the logo for a new Athena Swan bronze awardee. Attached to the ticket was an image file of the logo, which I’ve seen before, uploaded to many areas of the media library. I decided to take a closer look at all relevant school pages…
Continue reading: Standardising content assets for sustainable use
‘Just in case’ content is created or duplicated online, ‘just in case’ users might need it. Alex Saint, from the Current Students content team at the University, explains why sometimes less is more.
The ultimate goal for University webpages is that users can quickly and easily find the information they are looking for.
Yet one of the biggest challenges the Current Students content team faces is unnecessary and duplicate content – a historical issue at the University. Here’s why we might suggest removing content from your pages.
Digital sustainability is what we can do to reduce our impact on the planet’s resources. Not just at work, but in all areas of our lives where we use digital.
Many people assume that digital technology is ‘clean’ because it doesn’t create visible pollution. The internet is actually responsible for 4% of global carbon emissions – equivalent to the entire aviation industry.
Continue reading: Digital sustainability – why is it important and what are we doing?
Organisation charts presented in PDF format are one of the worst offenders when it comes to accessibility. Rob, from our Content Design team, explains how he turned one such chart into accessible HTML content.
When the bristol.ac.uk site was audited by Government Digital Services last year, one of the main issues that we had to fix was inaccessible PDFs.
PDFs pose particular problems for anyone with accessibility needs. It is possible to painstakingly add all of the structural tags for titles and headings so that the PDF passes accessibility criteria, but it’s unlikely that the effort will pay off; if someone finds 99% of PDFs that they encounter inaccessible, they’re not going to take the risk of opening another.
Continue reading: PDFs and accessibility, part 1: making our organisation chart accessible
Digital officers Katie Manktelow and Hazel Jackson have pair written their top tips for pair writing.
As the saying goes, two heads are better than one. Pair writing is two (or more) people writing together. Introduced by agile software developers who were writing code, it’s now common practice in content design teams including our own. We use this approach to write copy for the website.
Continue reading: Pair writing: Why we love it
We’ve been investing significantly in an intranet for University staff and postgraduate research students (PGRs). Previously our intranet content was scattered across our external website, seriously old internal content management systems, wikis and random crevices that only staff who’ve been at the University for decades would be able to find.
As we’ve just moved it out of beta and into live I thought it was a good opportunity to detail the design principles we’ve been using to inform its development.
It’s important to add we’re still at the early stages of a long journey. There’s a large roadmap of development ahead. But we believe that by sticking with these principles we can continue to build an intranet that will prove invaluable to all our staff and PGRs.
Our previous accessibility blog post explored some of the barriers that people face when they read online content. Barriers that stop people from being able to use the content.
Creating clear and accessible content has always been important. It means everyone can use and understand it.
However, as more and more services move online, it’s even more important that we reduce these barriers. It’s even more important to create clear and accessible content.
Here are seven things every content professional needs to do to make their content accessible.Continue reading: Seven things you need to do to make your content accessible
The second part of digital officer Charlotte Brewer’s series on content sprinting.
In my last blog post about the sprint way of working, I introduced it as a concept and looked at how we did sprint planning. In this post, I’ll show what it’s like to do the work as part of the content team in a sprint.
Once the sprint planning meeting is over, we get stuck into the list of tasks.
Each task is a specific, distinct thing that we need to do to complete the goal of the sprint. For our students’ Top Tasks sprint, these included:
Once we finish one task, we move onto the next task. Some of these are small enough for one of us to easily complete it. Others are bigger and need us all to work on it at once. Some tasks are straightforward, while some become blocked. This is where daily stand-ups come in.
It’s not only software that benefits from being delivered in sprints. Digital officer Charlotte Brewer discusses the practicalities of “content sprinting”.
Sprinting – an act or short spell of running at full speed. That’s the traditional definition. Since the times of the Ancient Greeks, the sprint has been seen as the pinnacle of the athletic world. And in the last decade or so, it’s also become popular in the world of work.
Software teams have been taking up ‘Agile’ practices that quickly deliver lots of small but functional improvements. Sprinting is fundamental to this. Like the sporting version, sprinting involves a lot of effort over a short space of time.
In the Digital Comms team, we’ve started to adopt this approach in the way we deliver new content. Our newly–formed content team has now completed five sprints since we started this new way of working in October. Continue reading: Content sprinting – part one
Deputy head of digital comms Alex Pardoe on how our newly-formed content team has transformed the way we deliver content.
This post is about the new way of working for the Digital Officers. Where previously we assigned project work to individual staff members through the project framework, now we’re assigning projects to the newly-formed “content team” and they’re using a modified version of Agile Scrum to get them not just done, but done-done.
Scrum has been used for years in software development, and we liked it for its simplicity and open-ended application. We felt it could work well for discovery and content design work as a team activity. Jeff Sutherland’s wife, Arline, adopted Scrum practices to improve communication and productivity in local churches. It’s not just for coding.