I’m looking for a meticulous editor to spend two days editing existing web pages in line with a given style guide.
Ideally you should be based in Birmingham (UK) so I can work closely with you and assist with inevitable technical issues.
The work needs to be completed within the next two weeks.
If you are interested please email us with a CV or examples of work.
It seems that every day the internet is giving us new ways to test the relationship between the citizen and the state. In a recent article for the BCS’* Savvy Citizens website I argue that we should be exploiting these new tools to encourage a more responsible and effective civic engagement.
I highlight a few of the useful online services, and even touch on how they can be used for subverting some aspects of civic life.
However, I then go on to suggest that for people to be engaging effectively they need to be doing so ‘with a keenness for rigorous, informed and effective debate’.
Read Using the internet for effective citizenship on the Savvy Citizens website.
*BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
There has been a lot of noise lately calling on local authorities to embrace social media. Clearly this is only useful if it’s an effective way to engage with citizens, and if the authority learns from it to improve that engagement. A number of tools they can be used to measure this, but now there’s one that does it for them.
Council Monitor (currently in beta) scours the internet to find what people are saying about your local authority. It shows at a glance the topics that those people are discussing and how positive or negative those discussions are, making it easier to monitor and compare the reputation of councils online.
This is an interesting tool because it allows anyone to see this information for free, and for a fee the councils themselves can fine-tune the data to strengthen the quality of the feedback they are receiving.
So the information is at once transparent (councils can’t hide behind rhetoric quite so easily and are encouraged to engage better) and useful (councils are given valuable data on which to build their engagement strategies).
According to new research, most young people aged 14-25 would be likely to vote in an election and would be more likely to if they could do so online. However, they don’t see social networking as particularly useful for furthering a cause, favouring instead an email to their Member of Parliament.
A recent YouGov poll for the Citizenship Foundation interviewed almost 4,000 14-25 year-olds about their attitudes to political participation, politicians and power in the United Kingdom.
The research was commissioned to mark the Citizenship Foundation’s 20th year.
I’ve just become aware of a book (yes, a book) of Twitter celebrities. If there was a charity edition, who would you like to see in it and why?
I’ll start off with @RealHughJackman, for donating $100,000 to charity via Twitter.
Who else?
On Tuesday I shall be attending the Digital Engagement Event, wearing my Citizenship Foundation hat and (probably) banging on about the importance of critical reflection.
I’m going to try live blogging on CoverItLive (time and energy permitting), so keep your eyes peeled.
There is a lot of exciting work being done in regards to using technology for civic engagement. Most of it though seems to be about access to information, more efficient and effective public services, and enfranchisement of citizens to hold decision-makers to account.
These are all laudable of course. But there does seem to be something missing: effective civic engagement - or more specifically, effective citizenship - requires critical reflection by all involved, and not simply the release and management of data by one party and the exercising of rights by another.
There are lots of tools and services now that exploit public data to help citizens understand their environment in meaningful ways, and expose the workings of local and national government. For example, MySociety offers a number of useful engagement tools: FixMyStreet enables people to monitor and lobby their council on issues such as pot-holes; WriteToThem makes it easy to contact your local MP; WhatDoTheyKnow aids the writing and delivery of Freedom of Information requests.
What these approaches don’t do - and it’s not their remit to - is encourage critical reflection on the part of the people involved. Councilors could, in theory, respond to complaints made via FixMyStreet, which in turn could lead to reflective discussion between themselves and the complainant: but this will only happen if both parties are so inclined; the tool itself doesn’t nurture that level of engagement and responsibility.
And neither should it: its job is to open up the data and put power in the hands of citizens. But for that power to be effective and useful it needs to be coupled with an understanding of the process, and a willingness on the part of the citizen to accept they may be wrong; and by citizen I mean anyone: council officers and politicians are citizens too.
In his Digital Britain Final Report Lord Carter proposes that:
“The changes that digital technologies bring require us to develop a new level of participation for a competitive digital knowledge economy and a modern democratic and fair 21st Century society”.
‘Participation’ suggests more than mere interest: it suggests a sharing of responsibilities in working towards a common goal. This, I think, is missing from much of the work that I see in the Digital Engagement field.
One tool I know of does go some way towards this, by encouraging more thorough investigation of an issue. Help Me Investigate enables people to pose a question - such as ‘Does the Job Centre check out employers when it advertises vacancies? - and collaborate to find the answer. The process helps to expose the intricacies of policies and the nature of things as being anything but straightforward or black and white. Although it doesn’t explicitly strive to highlight responsibilities of everyone rather than just the targets of investigations, Help Me Investigate does encourage critical analysis and collaboration in a way that many of the other tools don’t.
This is an area that I believe the Citizenship Foundation is well qualified to input to, and I shall be working a little to put the issue of critical reflection more visibly onto the government’s Digital Engagement agenda.
I have been developing a draft Twitter strategy and policy, based on Neil Williams’ draft strategy for government departments.
Although a long way from finished, I am releasing a very early draft now because Neil’s has received prominent media attention.
My version is already substantially different from Neil’s, and I still have a long way to go. There’s a lot that I want to rearrange, re-work or cut completely; it does not constitute the Citizenship Foundation’s strategy for using Twitter.
My main reason for releasing it now is that there are some inaccuracies in the original, particularly in regard to replies and direct messages, which are in danger of informing government strategies.
But hats off to Neil, for doing a superb job producing a draft from which people like me could work.
Download the latest version of my Draft Twitter Strategy.
Updates
This is feedback that I have already given for Neil’s document, reproduced here in case it’s useful.
Web accessibility can be an inexact science, and another unwelcome addition to work pressures for those who are not directly responsible for websites. But if we are to encourage and enable civic engagement, we must be as inclusive as possible: and that means being as accessible as possible.
A few months ago my friend Andy Mabbett gave a talk on basic web accessibility, tailored for people who create content rather than those who actually build websites. I transcribed it for him, and he has kindly let me publish it here in full.
Andy Mabbett is web manager for a large local authority. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or write to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
I can now take you through, point by point, the new WCAG 2 guidelines, explaining in detail what each one means. Hands up everybody who wants me to do that? Good, nobody. Right, hands up everybody who manages or creates – in terms of writing HTML – websites for a living.
Right, if you don’t understand accessibility – and if you don’t already do accessibility now – please leave the building, leave the country and leave the planet. Because if you’re doing that work professionally and you don’t already get accessibility, you’re in the wrong job. You’ve had fifteen or more years to get used to this: it’s time now that you knew what you were doing.
Today’s talk is for the rest of you: right? The people who use websites, put content onto websites, without having to know all the geeky stuff about what html tags are and labels for forms and all that sort of thing. The people who provide those tools should be making that work for you.
I’m going to try and illustrate some of the pitfalls of what you do on websites, or what you may be doing on websites, and how it may affect people in terms of the accessibility of your site.
Now most people think about accessibility – blind people using text readers. That’s a major issue in terms of accessibility but it’s not the only one. It’s about old people who have – as we all if we live long enough – a reduction in the ability to use ours senses or physical movement; it’s about people with physical disabilities, it’s about people who can’t use a mouse because they’ve knackered their wrist playing on the computers all the time, and have to use the keyboard or some other device; it’s about people with learning disabilities, it’s about people with hearing difficulties; you name it, it’s anybody who has some sort of difficulty. And if you make a website accessible for them, you’ll make it more usable for all your users.
Ok, that’s the preamble; here comes the talk.
I’m afraid this talk, to illustrate this point, isn’t very accessible.
[Low voice] The first thing I want to say is that you’re going to find it very hard to hear me; [raises voice] okay? So you didn’t hear that, did you?
There’s an analogy there: I was speaking in a very small font (it was probably Comic Sans). If you write in a small font, then people will not be able to read it if they’ve got poor eyesight; it stands to reason.
Now yes, there are tools in their browsers that can make the font bigger again; but they’ve already got the font on their browser set to the size that they need it at for a 100 percent text. If you make your text 90 percent in a footnote they can probably cope with that; but if you have some artistic design on your page and you design your pages to work at 80 percent – or 60 percent – then they’re going to have to use those tools to magnify the page to read your pages and then switch them back to read everybody else’s, and you’re putting barriers in their way.
So please, keep your font sizes reasonable and – if it’s within your control – make it possible for them to resize text.
Now I’m going to talk about one of three different things, and I want you to tell me which one you’d rather I talk about. Would you like me to talk about ‘here’, ‘here’, or ‘here’?
If you have links on your website that say ‘click here’ – ‘to read more about sport, click here’; ‘to read more about chocolate, click here’; to read more about music, click here’ – and all that links is the bit that says ‘click here’, or ‘here’, or something non-meaningful like that - then people using certain assistive technology have all the links separate to the rest of the page read out to them. So they can say ‘read all the links on the page out to me so I can see what to link to’. Then all they might hear is ‘here’, ‘here’, ‘here’: it’s meaningless.
Make your link text meaningful, standalone and unique on the page; so never have ‘more news’ twice if it links to two different pages. Each link – the actual link text – needs to be unique.
Now the next thing is, I want you to tell me which sentence in the previous illustration I gave was green. Come on, you all heard it; which bit of it was written in green ink? You don’t know, do you?
If you write a page on your website or on your blog and you say ‘all the things I like are in green and all the things I don’t like are in red’, then somebody who is blind and having that page read to them by their assistive software – or someone who is red-green colourblind, which is the commonest for of colourblindness; or somebody who’s looking at a black and white printout of that page; or somebody who’s looking at it on a monochrome mobile browsing device such is an early generation internet-aware mobile phone – can’t see that colour.
Never use colour as the only distinguisher for choices on your web pages or in your blogs. Always have ‘the things I like are in green and have an asterisk next to them; the things I don’t like are in red and have a hash symbol next to them’, or something like that. So there is a visual indicator that doesn’t rely on colour and there’s an indicator which can be read out, and the easy way to think about that if you’re not familiar with assistive technologies that read web pages, is imagining you’ve got to read that page over a telephone to a friend.
Which of the sentences in the previous explanation was on the left? And which was on the right hand side of the page that I was reading from? No, you can’t tell me!
Geo-spacial positioning of the content on your page is meaningless to a blind person. It is meaningless to someone who is reading your RSS feed.
If you look on my blog and do a search back you’ll find a post from about a year ago where somebody said ‘the icon on the right is our new logo’, and it was actually on the left in Google Reader; because Google Reader linearised the page and put the icon top-left.
Never refer to things on the right or left. Never put images side by side, and say ‘the image on the left is better than the image on the right’ or whatever; say ‘the first’ or ‘the second’ image, or label them ‘image a’ and ‘image b’: and that way the position of those images doesn’t matter because there is no position when the page is read out.
When you’re learning to code html [interruption from someone singing loudly], when you’re learning [more interruption], when you’re learning to [yet more interruption]; you can stop now John.
We’ve all been in the situation when you load a web page and it starts playing music to you. And if you’re trying to watch television at the time, or listen to music, that’s annoying. If you’re in an office full of people and it’s a page you shouldn’t be looking at at work it could be very embarrassing (so I’m told). If you’re a blind person who’s having that page read to you by assistive technology it stops you accessing that page; it stops you knowing what’s on that page. So never play music or other sounds on your pages, unless the user says ‘play it now’ by hitting a ‘play’ button or a ’start’ button. Please.
Okay. Now I’m going to tell you the real secret of getting web design right. It’s [long pause]. Okay? You all got that? I’m sorry, that bit of the talk was in Javascript and all of your ears have got Javascript disabled.
The number of times I visit web pages - I have Javascript disabled in my browser for technical reasons to do with my work - and I have to activate it in order to read what’s on the page.
Don’t use Javascript for important content; use Javascript to do the fancy posh bits around the outside. But your basic content should be available to users who have no Javascript capability: because their mobile device might not do it; because their PC might not be able to do it because it’s an old one; because their employer might block Javascript at the company firewall. Or because they might be the most important user that you’ve got of all, which is Google; which doesn’t parse Javascript to see the content of your pages.
So that’s an important lesson for your benefit as well as the benefit of your users.
One of the things you also need to think about with HTML design is to make sure your QRPs and your PTZs aren’t conflicting with your KLMs.
Or if you are going to use long acronyms such as I’ve just done, you’re going to have to make sure that they’re explained to your users. Don’t assume – unless you’re talking to a very specific audience – that they know what they mean; and if you are able to use the proper abbreviation element in html, to expand those abbreviations and acronyms.
Finally, I’m going to talk about the ‘alt’ text on images. Now I hope you all know what that is; I hope we’ve got past the stage where I have to explain that. I hope nobody in here has ‘alt’ text on their images that says ‘image’ or ‘f437.jpg’ or anything like that: if you do, go to the back of the class.
I’m going to close with an illustration of ‘alt’ text on two images; this is a real example which one of my friends found on a web page about a holiday site. The first image had a picture of a local animal; the second one had a picture of some people enjoying one of the activities that you could do at this holiday site.
Now the way to understand whether your ‘alt’ text is working - as with the examples I used earlier - is to imagine reading it over the phone. Because that’s what assistive technology does: it reads the page out and it reads the ‘alt’ text inline, as though it was part of the text of the page.
And this holiday site’s website had a picture of an animal followed by a picture of a holiday activity. And it said:
‘At Sunnyside Holiday Camp you can see a cow canoeing in the river’.
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen.
Andy Mabbett , March 2009
Re-tweeting is the act of forwarding a message on Twitter. But it can result in distorted messages being incorrectly attributed to people.
Accidentally altering meaning when forwarding messages is nothing new; so why is it different with Twitter?
Tweets (that is, messages on Twitter) have a maximum length of 140 characters. When a message is re-tweeted (ie re-published with the author attributed) the original author’s name and a prefix like ‘RT’ or ‘Retweet’ is added to the front of the message. This adds to the total number of characters, and often pushes it over the maximum 140 mark.
To get around this, people will truncate the original message to make it fit. This is fine if it’s edited well, but often the message gets paraphrased. Obviously there’s a danger here of changing the original meaning; this is exacerbated if the re-tweet is itself re-tweeted with new paraphrasing.
Let’s look at an example:
“@joswinson: recording an interview about the 100th anniversary of the suffragettes Parliamentary protest for BBC’s Record Review this weekend”
I’ve carefully removed two words (’an’ and ‘the’) to shorten the text without distorting the meaning:
“RT @joswinson: recording interview about 100th anniversary of the suffragettes Parliamentary protest for BBC’s Record Review this weekend”
But now I’ve paraphrased the original message, which may have completely changed its intended meaning:
“RT @joswinson: recording an interview this weekend about 100th anniversary of the suffragettes Parliamentary protest”
Did Jo mean the interview was at the weekend, or that the BBC programme was? And what was important to her: the fact that she was recording a programme about the suffragettes, or that it was for the BBC (a detail I removed)?
And now let’s re-tweet the re-tweet:
“RT @citizensheep: RT @joswinson: 100th anniversary of the suffragettes Parliamentary protest, this weekend”
Jo never said the anniversary was this weekend. That presumption was made by me when I edited the message for re-tweeting.
It’s like Chinese Whispers. Unfortunately it’s more dangerous: because - unlike Chinese Whispers - the message retains an attribution to the original author, but may have a completely different meaning to what that person had intended.
And it doesn’t end there.
People often like to add their own comments, which may contain their own opinion. If it’s added before the message it’s clear enough:
“Actually, I think it endangers them. RT @citizensheep: I think the internet changes lives, but not so sure it necessarily improves them.”
But often it’s added to the end:
“RT @citizensheep: I think the internet changes lives, but not so sure it necessarily improves them. Actually, I think it endangers them.”
In the second message Citizensheep appears to be credited with an opinion he never actually voiced.
Arguably Twitter also makes it easy to find problems and correct them. But the speed with which information spreads now means that the damage can be done before the problem is even noticed.
There are potential dangers here for organisations - such as charities and public bodies - who have to be careful about the message they’re projecting. We need to try and make sure our messages are unambiguous in the first place, and be quick to manage any misunderstanding or misinterpretation.
We also need to be very careful how we treat other people’s tweets. Mis-representing someone could have unwelcome consequences that undermine their integrity and damage their reputation.
In the examples above, the original messages were real (reproduced with permission) but the edited versions are works of fiction. I chose to illustrate it this way to avoid upsetting anyone, but real examples are easy to find.
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