Yesterday (Monday 10 September) Chris Jones, Louise Tierney and myself attended the Digital Futures 2012 event at the Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury, organised by our colleagues in Shropshire Council's Communications team.
The interesting and entertaining sessions given by the speakers provides a lot of food for thought when it comes to considering how digital and social media is changing the way we interact with the customers that we, as a council, provide services for. You can look for the #digifutures12 hashtag on Twitter to see the tweets from the day, and the discussions that have carried on since then to see how well this event went.
Encouragingly, some of the points raised reinforced our own approach when it comes to building and implementing online solutions, such as factoring in, monitoring and testing accessibility and usability requirements from beginning to end of our projects. We are also striving to be more open about our processes and the data we hold, which is why Project WIP even exists. This blog is a way of exposing what we do to the public, and has even been name-checked as an inspiration for the Government Digital Services new http://gov.uk website.
However, we were once again shown that there is always something new to learn & improve upon. This can either be how we learn from and interact with the customer themselves, or by questioning our own assumptions as developers approaching an idea, or even paying closer attention to the information provided by our various websites.
In one of the sessions, run by Alison Smith from Pesky People (@peskypeople - www.peskypeople.co.uk), it was highlighted how an image on the homepage of shropshire.gov.uk failed to use alt tags properly. This image was used as part of the main feature for the "Shropshire Health & Wellbeing Strategy consultation" we were promoting, but the alt tag simply stated "health and wellbeing" instead of what it actually was - "an image of a stethoscope and an apple on a red background". This simple oversight prevents visually impaired users knowing what that image is, and reminded us how important it is that we train our editors to describe the image itself and not just the context it is being used in.
A good discussion was raised from a question by a member of the audience, which boiled down to just because we, as developers, can do something doesn't mean others can or will (i.e. knowing how to refine results in a search engine, or even browsing the internet itself).
This is a concept that we've come across a number of times over the years from both sides of the argument. We've often gone off and started exploring new ideas and website features before coming to the realisation that it is unnecessary or would be a distraction from the information that we are actually trying to provide. Likewise, we've sometimes been given a specification from a client and have had to explain how choosing that approach would potentially ostracise a large chunk of their target audience, either because of a technical restriction or accessibility concerns.
One thing is for sure, we've learnt a lot from the day and we will strive even more to be the militant optimists for Shropshire Council!
I'll leave you with a quote from the day:
"Beer, pizza and coffee are the fuel of innovation"
Carrie Bishop, FutureGov
@carriebish - http://wearefuturegov.com/