Tag Archives: accessibility

I wrote a book about governance: ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’

Posted on May 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

When an intranet loses its usefulness over time, and people become disengaged and end up working around it rather than through it, I often find that the strategy and governance have been neglected.

Even a strong and appropriate strategy will founder if the governance isn’t in place to execute it.

I see governance as the foundation of a great intranet, and by ‘great’ I mean an intranet that is useful, useable, and supports the organisation’s goals and people’s needs.

I often blog about intranet governance, but my brand new book offers a lot more than I could ever drip-feed via short posts. Writing a book has helped crystallise my thinking around governance, and delve deep into my past experience as an intranet manager, and as a consultant.

Take a look at my book now – it’s called ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’ and I mean for it to be relevant to intranets, collaboration, digital workplace and mobile workspace governance, while focussing on intranets.

I’m so pleased to have it published through Intranätverk, it’s been great to work with Kristian Norling and his team. Seeing the final book on my tablet has made the months of writing all worth the effort. I’m thrilled to be able to offer you my experience, guidance, and tips and hope you’ll consider my book a toolkit to better governance and a better intranet.

Please take a look at what the book offers you and your organisation – this is a ‘business book’ that should help organisations of every size, but I also hope it’s of interest to individual practitioners and ‘lone intranet managers’. I think this book can support you.

* Digital success or digital disaster? – Book available now.

* Follow me on – let me know what you think!

Accessible content for everyone and every device

Posted on October 21, 2014 | Leave a comment

Everyone whether they have a disability or not needs to have the same experience when using any intranet information or applications. Employees with a disability may use devices to help them. Your intranet needs to be compatible with these to avoid risking breaking the guidelines and any law that applies in the country where the person works.

Accessible content is also easier to adapt to use with mobile devices e.g. smartphones, tablets, and laptops with their different screen sizes. Try thinking of accessible content as being a step further on from it meeting your usable standard.

If your intranet has information or applications that are not accessible to all employees, you will be breaking the web accessibility guidelines. Legislation and codes of practice based on the latest World Wide Web, Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C Accessible content WCAG 2.0 AA) guidelines will apply in most countries. US Section 508 and UK DDA 1995 are two examples. These guidelines are at three levels, A, AA, and AAA covering the most basic problems to the most advanced problems experienced by people with a disability when using your intranet.

Many organisations find it difficult to see the benefits from publishing standards. I remove the barriers to show the benefits from each publishing standard in this series of posts. Publishing standards aim to:

Reduce the risk of sensitive information leaks
Improve the overall user experience
Make people using your intranet more satisfied with it
Improve people’s productivity
Improve people’s quality of work

Benefits

Knowing that you are helping people with disabilities to use your intranet gives three main benefits:

People with disabilities using your intranet will have the same or similar experience to anyone else. This will encourage more frequent and extensive use because the intranet is accessible and usable and meets the needs for everyone.
You can encourage your publishers to make their content and applications accessible to meet their legal requirements. There is the added, sometimes overlooked, benefit that accessible content also displays well in other devices such as tablets and smartphones if it meets accessibility standards.
Your organisation complies with a legal requirement. It can also see investment made in your intranet has the benefit of being available in other devices that help with new ways of working and while mobile.

My next post on navigation will be the last in this series. I hope you have found them helpful.

Are your intranet standards ‘smart’?

Posted on August 21, 2012 | 1 comment

I have reviewed many intranets and have been amazed at the variety of publishing standards and how they are enforced. These vary from no publishing standards through to everything being locked down depending on the importance of complying with standards. More importantly it is the amount of time, effort, and money that is used to enforce people to comply with the standards when they publish information.

I sometimes think organisations lose the plot and forget to look at the costs being spent for the benefit being gained.

Your intranet needs standards to make sure your organisation complies with business, user, regulatory, and legal requirements in any country it operates in. The best approach is to have ‘smart’ standards that need the minimum time, effort, and cost which achieving the maximum effectiveness and benefits. How many of these questions can you answer “yes” to?

Do you train your publishers on what your intranet standards?
Do you also train your publishers on why your intranet has these standards?
Do you educate and support your publishers with guidance to understand more about your standards?
Do you embed any of your standards in the publishing templates e.g. branding, navigation menu?
Do publishers need to comply with your standards before their content is published e.g. images need to have alternative texts before they can be used?
Do you review content for compliance?
Do you remind your publishers if their content is non-compliant?
Do you remove content if no action by your publishers to comply?
Do you measure how compliant your intranet is?
Have you measured it more than once?

If you answered “yes” to all these questions then award yourself a gold medal!

If you answered “no” to any of these questions perhaps you had better contact me?

1 Comment

Posted in benchmark, best practice, content management, governance, intranet, publishing, standards, usability

Tagged accessibility, best practice, governance, intranet, publishing, standards, training, usability, value

Standards that make SharePoint 2010 a success

Posted on June 5, 2012 | 1 comment

When you are faced with implementing SharePoint 2010 your intranet needs the right standards to make the launch and ongoing use a great success.

How can you do this? Firstly you need to be clear why you have standards. The reasons why usually include:

Legal: web accessibility, copyright and image rights
Regulatory: compliance with country and international agreements
Business: content reviewed regularly and up to date
Users: content ownership clear, easy to use and find

Your intranet standards need to:

Improve the overall user experience
Make people more satisfied
Increase productivity
Save costs
Benefit the business

When using SharePoint 2010 I recommend five standards you must include. These cover the different types of content and tools that you can use with SharePoint 2010 ranging from accredited information through to collaborative discussions.

1. Ownership

You need to be clear that all your information is managed and has an owner. Intranet managers need to be able to contact an owner if there is a problem with their content quickly and easily. People need to know who to contact if they need more information not shown or wish to check about anything that has been published. You need to reassure your senior managers that any risk has been removed of non-compliance from information not managed.

2. Currency

Your employees must be confident they are using the most up to date information. You need to clearly show a review date, in line with your information retention policy, for people to see. Your content must be reviewed regularly and be removed if it is no longer needed and out of date.

3. Security

SharePoint 2010 permissions need to be correctly set so people only see the information they have permission to see. Get these right at an organisation-wide level to save time and effort later. Owners (site administrators) of content can decide at a site level who can have permission to create, edit, as well as view content published.

4. Usability

Your information must be usable and valuable to people using it. Use SharePoint 2010 webparts to create the experience research with people has shown is needed. Train your publishers on ‘tone of voice’ and ‘writing for the web’ to help achieve this. To use the full range of SharePoint 2010 features well you must make it easy for people to share views, discover other people and their skills, find the right information and use what they find with the minimum of effort and time taken.

5. Accessibility

This is not an optional extra. It is mandatory. You need to go that extra step beyond usable content and make sure your content is accessible to everyone whether they are impaired or not. It needs to meet WCAG 2.0 guidelines. Legal requirements do vary from country to country. For the UK AA level is the current expert recommendation.

What you need to do is check standards are complied with. This can be achieved by using people or outside auditors to check content or better still, if you can afford it, an automated compliance checker tool.

1 Comment

Posted in benefit, governance, intranet, SharePoint 2010, standards, usability, web accessibility

Tagged accessibility, collaboration, governance, intranet, sharepoint 2010, standards, usability standards

The ‘font’ of all (intranet) knowledge?

Posted on May 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

This is another example of BT’s intranet standards used to give users a great experience.

Most browsers, and especially those for people with visual impairment, allow users to adjust font sizes to suit their needs. Therefore, it is important that you do not fix font in an exact, or ‘absolute’, size because users may not be able to see it!

Style sheets in content management systems will take care of font sizes, but if you create your own HTML & style sheets, you must use relative sizing, e.g. -1, or +1.

HTML tag

You should use style sheets instead of the tag to define font attributes. If you still have existing tags within your site you should make sure they are relative and not fixed. You must then switch to style sheets at your next re-design.

Using styles for fonts

When using styles also always use the relative tags, such as percentage or plus and minus. For example if you want a headline to be bigger then use something like +2, or 150%, or ‘bigger’. Similarly, to make something appear smaller in scale to the rest of the page use -1, 75% or ‘smaller’.

The use of percentage, ’em’ units or other ‘relative’ mechanisms to define the font size makes it easy for users to change the text size using their browser settings.

Testing

Testing should be done in the initial stages of creating a set of styles so that subsequent pages linked to the same style sheet will work:

you need to check pages using the “Largest” and “Smallest” text size settings in the browser
also test using a range of browser resolutions and settings to ensure the content does not become truncated or cause overlapping sections of content and text
switch off the style sheet in the browser to ensure the content is still meaningful.

How users know its the right content

Posted on April 13, 2010 | 5 comments

In my post ‘How to get quality content’ I showed how much people value BT’s intranet and are confident about the integrity of the content they use. BT’s intranet standards mean publishers must keep information up to date and clearly owned so users can rely on it.

In this post I’m going to cover BT’s intranet standard on naming of pages that helps users to find what they need more easily.

Each page should have a title relevant to the content to help users when they bookmark your site or scan search results. The title also appears in the top of the browser window giving users extra reassurance they have arrived at the right place.

Also try to pick a title which will help users when looking in an A-Z (so publishers in BT don’t need to start everything with BT) or call your page ‘homepage’ or ‘index’.

Title tags are in the head section of the HTML. Users of content management systems can set the page title in the properties section of the page. Aim for having enough information in the first 20 characters of the title to identify the page.

Headings help users scan the page, search engines summarise it and text readers to skim it. Sub section headings help break up the page and allow the user to understand the page structure.

Some assistive technologies have a “skip to next heading” option, so use the

,

and

tag (or choose a heading style in the content management system) rather than just make ‘normal’ text look larger.

Choose your heading text with care, aiming to maximise ‘scanning’. The main page heading should ideally match the title tag and give a clear reassurance to people arriving at that page that they have chosen the correct link.

5 Comments

Posted in benefit, best practice, content management, intranet, navigation, publishing, search, standards, web accessibility

Tagged accessibility, best practice, bt intranet, killer content, publishing, search, standards, usability standards, users

The benefit you gain from intranet standards

Posted on March 16, 2010 | 4 comments

I was asked at the recent IntraTeam event (most excellent! :-)) to explain in more detail about BT’s intranet standards for publishers. I have posted before about 5 ‘must have’ standards and about accessibility and usability.

I thought it would help to say first why I think standards are important and the benefits for everyone in BT.

Intranet publishing standards need to have compelling reasons for being used. For BT’s intranet these can include:

Legal: web accessibility, copyright and image rights
Regulatory: BT’s undertakings with OFCOM
Business: content up to date and reviewed and branding
Users: print, PDA features and global navigation bar

The main thing is, whatever the reason, is that it:

Improves the overall user experience
Making users more satisfied
Increases productivity
Saves costs and
Benefits the business

You must also make it as easy as possible for publishers to comply with these standards. The higher you make this barrier the more difficult it will be to achieve and the more time and effort needed to do this.

So template features for content management that build in standards like owner, review date, copyright, PDA versions of the information mean publishers have no choice and find it much easier to comply.

I’ll cover our standards in more detail in the next few weeks. Please let me know which ones you want me to cover first.

4 Comments

Posted in benefit, best practice, governance, intranet, publishing, social media, standards, usability, user testing, value, web accessibility

Tagged accessibility, bt intranet, content, governance, publishing, social media, standards, usability standards, value

Tag Archives: accessibility

Accessible content for everyone and every device

Benefits

Are your intranet standards ‘smart’?

Standards that make SharePoint 2010 a success

The ‘font’ of all (intranet) knowledge?

Using styles for fonts

Testing

How users know its the right content

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