ClacksWeb Triumphs at Communication Awards
Published on:
09
November 2005
The Council's website, ClacksWeb, won the Accessibility Award in the e-government Good Communication Awards 2005.
The award was collected by the Council's Web Development Manager Daniel Champion at the ceremony held at the glamorous Bafta building in London on Monday 7th November.
A thrilled Daniel said: "We've made a huge effort to make the website accessible to all visitors, whatever their abilities, and I am delighted to receive this recognition from the awards panel."
Only last week, ClacksWeb became the first local authority website in the country to achieve accessibility accreditation from The Shaw Trust and only the second site anywhere to accomplish the Trust's 'plus' award.
Chief Executive Keir Bloomer said: "I am absolutely delighted that ClacksWeb has won yet another award. Our webmaster Daniel Champion, deserves great credit for all he has achieved."
Although web accessibility is about making a website accessible to all users, it's particularly concerned with those with visual impairments or disabilities. Blind web users may use a screen reader to 'speak' the content of the web page to them. Partially sighted web users may use a screen magnifier, to blow up the text on screen. ClacksWeb has been designed to be accessed by those who are not able to see, hear, move or process some types of information easily. It is also suitable to those with colour blindness and dyslexia.
Accessibility can also refer to people who are accessing the site from particular environments (e.g. a public library with a slow internet connection), or with particular technologies (e.g. a mobile device).
Many organisations' reasons for making their website accessible are to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act and to maximise their online audience. But it is also the case that accessible websites are easier and less time-consuming to manage, better suited to handheld devices and likely to place higher in the search engine rankings.
The awards were presented by Phil Woolas, Minister for Local Government, the BBC's Gary Richardson and Trenton Moss of Webcredible, one of the UK's leading consultancies for website usability and accessibility. According to Trenton, Clackmannanshire Council's site is an "excellent example of best practice - images have descriptive alternative text, headings have been appropriately labelled and link text is informative." The site even takes that next step towards what Trenton calls "true accessibility", by allowing easy tabbing through the website for motor impaired users and providing extra navigation for screen reader users.
ClacksWeb was re-launched in March 2005. A panel of site users was established in August 2004 and throughout the site development their views were sought on a range of topics. The panel included one blind user and one partially sighted user.
The site receives an average of 15,000 visits a month and the average number of pages viewed each month has almost doubled to 400,000 since the relaunch. The most popular pages include those with information on current vacancies, school holidays, council tax and planning applications.
In 2001 ClacksWeb was named the best community website in Scotland at the prestigious Winners at the Web awards.