With the weather improving this week, the team has had another busy week. So let’s jump into this week’s weeknotes.

Celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day on 16 May

On Thursday (16 May 2024), was Global Accessibility Awareness Day and to celebrate and raise awareness, Sophie published a blog post that investigates how poorly designed, inaccessible content impacts users of all different walks of life.

Our content featured six individuals who each use our website services to accomplish a specific task, from applying for a permit to accessing data for their dissertation. We investigated the various challenges that inaccessible content poses our users, and how this impacts not just our customers, but our organisation’s reputation as a whole.

Meeting our legal obligations around accessibility is important to make sure no one is excluded from accessing information or services, but accessibility benefits everyone.

You can find out more about how many people might have a disability, impairment or other characteristics which might affect how they use your service through this free tool developed by the Department for Education.

Updates to the week notes site

As you may have noticed in the past few weeks, there have been updates to the Week notes site. These updates have been made to address the accessibility and usability issues with the site on both desktop and mobile devices.

As it was noticed that the tab order was incorrect with the navigation, no skip to content link, no focus colour, no footer and English text appearing on the Welsh side of the site. So we wanted to put into practice what we preach by first addressing these.

As we aren’t developers, much of this has been “learn by doing”, with lots of trial and error on our test site. Along with reviewing a lot of guides and forum questions, and occasionally breaking the test site.

With these updates, it should help our users navigate the site better on both desktop and mobile. However, there is still more to be done. As we know the navigation menu on mobile devices does need to be improved. When this is done, we can then look at other pages within the site and look to improve those. So watch this space in the following weeks for further improvements.

Registering contaminated equipment with NRW

Sam’s been working with SMEs on new content that will enable businesses to register equipment that contains harmful chemicals with NRW.

These chemicals are called PCBs - polychlorinated biphenyls. They are banned now, but were used in electrical equipment like transformers or fluorescent light starter units. If someone is repeatedly exposed to them, they can cause serious health problems and they must be disposed of by specialist waste forms so they do not harm the environment.

The new content describes how people must identify, label and dispose of contaminated equipment. The form enables people to tell us about equipment they hold, or about equipment they have sold to another, or disposed of.

The form has lots of routing so that users who only want to register, for example, can do that, then skip questions about deregistration – and vice versa. Some users will have small amounts of equipment to tell us about so can do this in a form field; others will be able to upload documents.

We’re hoping to go live with this in the next couple of weeks.

Check if you’re allowed to use land we manage

Sam’s Monday was focused on ‘permissions’ work.

Sam and SME reviewed the data for the one year old check service:

  • 1354 checks since last May
  • 67 in Welsh
  • Most searched for is drones

The 1354 checks online mean that users don’t need to contact us or search through lots of content on our website to find an answer.

It was good to chat about small iterations to the service. We’re adding running, walking and cycling next as the data tells us these are often searched for.

Reducing workload by putting the onus on the user

Reducing the burden on teams by expecting the user to do the work only works if the user is able to easily do the thing we’re asking them to do.

We’re at risk of creating more work for teams if we expect users to ‘work it out’ when there isn’t an easy way to do this.

We have a tricky problem like this to deal with right now: it’s around how NRW calculates fees we charge people for using land we manage.

It’s been decided that people pay a reduced fee if they hold an event that is only partly held on land we manage. The idea was that the event holder gives us proof of how much NRW managed land their event used and we calculate the fee accordingly.

Sam and Phil’s question has been: ‘how does someone calculate the percentage of NRW managed land they used?’ There is no easy to use, easy to interpret, map on our website. What about rights of way, bridleways – are they ‘NRW managed land’? How does someone know where the boundaries are? Where is NRW managed land anyway?

We’re told staff can calculate this as they have access to GIS tools (unlike most users), but they have been promised no extra work. There is no easy answer to this right now.

Marine licensing transformation

Sam and Toyah’s work on band 1 marine licensing continues. This week we have been getting stuck into desk research, unearthing useful insights from various sources and determining how each element might impact on the twin goals of:

  • improving applicant experience
  • reducing the amount of time MLT staff lose because of poor quality applications

Digging into the details has been really useful in increasing our understanding of the process as a whole. Toyah’s complete newness to the subject (and the organisation!) has led to her asking questions which perhaps may not have been considered otherwise. It’s easy to get overly familiar with a topic, so having a complete beginner’s perspective as well is actually a real asset.

On Friday we continued this exploration, working with Sean from the MRPaAT team to bring in his subject matter insight. We’re really enjoying this collaborative approach to working, and finding it a very productive way to move forward.

Other stuff we’ve been up to

  • Owain attended ‘Digital and Agile: the foundations’, a half day course run by the Centre for Digital Public Services.
  • Owain had created a Google Dashboard for some of the Marine pages on the website
  • Alex has been working on the release implementation plan for the improved hazardous waste consignment returns service.
  • Alex has been supporting the business regarding the changes to waste sampling and reporting requirements for materials facilities.
  • Heledd and Alex are about to kick off planning for the next Umbraco upgrade.
  • Shaun has finally got the long running installations application form completed and with translation, it should go live soon.
  • Shaun has made a number of changes to the septic tank registration pages based on user feedback.

Fun fact

Following the event of the previous weekend, where we were able to see the Northern Lights. This natural phenomenon has been observed since 30,000 BC, with many different cultures have their folktales about the event.

The Inuit, Native Americans, Aboriginals and others all have their own stories and beliefs about the Aurora. For example, there are some Inuit tribes who say that the spirits of animals they hunted are in northern lights. This would mean that the Northern lights are the spirits of seals, deer, beluga wales and salmon! Other Inuit tribes call the northern lights “aqsarniit”, which means “football players”. They believe that the lights are the spirits of the dead, playing football with the head of a walrus.

The Aboriginals often associated the lights with fire, which has lead to many different folktales in the Aboriginal culture. Some tribes believe that the lights are bush fires in the spirit world. Others have a darker myth and believed that an evil spirit created the lights.

A Native American tribe in Wisconsin used to believe that the lights were the ghosts of their defeated enemies who were looking for revenge and tried to rise again.

Sámi people in Finland used to believe that the lights were created by whales ejecting a spume of water. Meanwhile, the Sámi children in Norway ran back inside their houses the moment the lights appeared, because according to their belief, the lights were evil spirits.