Access issues

Clearly, some intranet audiences have limited computer access. Computers may have to be shared or may only be available when workers are not completing core duties. Other audiences have no apparent need to use a computer, and there is a danger that these workers will be completely ignored for that reason when the intranet is designed. Some staff types at risk of being ignored include:

• sales employees in a retail environment
• educational teaching staff
• production line employees
• delivery and transportation workers
• heavy industry plant operators
• maintenance and repair crews
• hospitality industry workers
• workers in health care professions

[October one-pager by Stephen Byrne, read the full article]

With any redesign comes the opportunity for a fresh new look and feel. Drawing their inspiration from the best of public-facing sites, intranets are shrugging off their dated appearance and joining the modern age.

These design improvements matter. As discussed in the earlier article Should the intranet look sexy?, intranet sites don’t have a marketing role, but they do need to have a professional and engaging appearance.

Fundamentally, this is about trust. Staff need have confidence that the intranet will provide them with accurate and up-to-date information. An old, ugly and dated site sends the opposite message, that the intranet is uncared for and under-resourced.

There is an also an emotional element to intranet design. Intranets should reflect the cultures of the organisations they serve, and can also help to drive cultural change.

At a basic level, intranets need to have a clear brand and identity of their own, distinct from the public-facing site and providing continuity as the organisation evolves and restructures.

As intranets are hidden within organisations, it is hard to know what good intranet design looks like. This article shares a few examples from across the globe, not as definitive ‘right’ designs, but as inspiration for other teams to follow. While very different in their design approaches, all the showcased intranets have elements to learn from.

[July KM Column, read the full article]

The good news

There have been some encouraging improvements:

• Some now include built-in “accessibility checkers”, which assess content against a wide range of accessibility issues. Far from perfect, they do at least highlight many common issues.
Cutting-and-pasting from Word removes most of the Word “junk code” that impact both web standards and accessibility.
• Accessibility details can be added to images, links and tables. In most cases, this can be enforced.
• A lot of the old-school formatting in the products has been replaced by the use of CSS.
• By default, functionality such as calendars and forms produces reasonably clean HTML.

Still some work to go

Despite the improvements, there are still outstanding issues:

• Having built-in accessibility checkers is nice, but not a lot of use if content produced by the CMS routinely fails its own tests. (This looked very odd during the demos!)
• The checkers also don’t do anywhere near enough to correct (or help to correct) the issues, and can overwhelm the author with detail.
• It’s often not clear exactly when accessibility is enforced. Is it during editing, when the page is checked in, later in the workflow, or before final publishing?
• Vendor understanding of accessibility is still very weak, often no more than “well, we’ve published site x that met level 3, so we must be fine”.
• Cutting-and-pasting from Word is still a source of problems, remarkable considering how important this is for authors.
• Legacy HTML still remains in the products, such as setting the widths of objects in pixels, or picking colours out of Windows-style colour pickers (rather than using CSS).
• Online forms produced by the CMS are particularly poor in terms of accessibility.
• Having the CMS itself being accessible for authors is still a distant pipe dream.

What it means

Expect more from your CMS when it comes from accessibility. If the products you’re assessing don’t offer anything in this area, consider looking at some that do! (There are over 140 CMS products in Australia, so there’s plenty to choose from.)

Even if some functionality is offered, look under the hood to see what it really means in practice, and take nothing for granted.

Accessibility is an important issue, and it’s good to see that CMS vendors are finally making some substantive progress in this area. Still a long way to go, but hopefully we’re on our way.