Yet another very busy week in the digital team, well after all digital is never done! It’s almost the end of September, what has happened to our summer?

photo of a dog hiding from the day in their bed

Accessibility regulations

Six years ago, the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 were introduced to make sure council and third sector organisation websites and apps can be used by as many people as possible.

This includes those with:

  • impaired vision
  • motor difficulties
  • cognitive impairments
  • learning disabilities
  • deafness or impaired hearing.

For more information and to better understand why you need to meet the website and mobile app accessibility regulations, please see: Understanding accessibility requirements for public sector bodies.

Our accessibility journey isn’t at an end. In fact, it never will be! Being accessible is continuous process to make sure our customers can access, read and understand all of our digital content, regardless of any limitations they may have. It’s about being inclusive.

In fact not complying with the regulations is discrimination and is breaking the law.

Collaborative working with break out groups

This week, Kim, Shaun and Sophie got together to discuss some of the longer-term work that we’ve identified in the queue of work, to establish next steps and help move projects forward. With lots of disruption and changes across the business as a result of the case for change, we’ve not heard back from some subject matter experts about their projects, so we’ve had to look at solutions on a case-by-case basis.

As a team, there’s often so much going on and lots of conflicting priorities so it’s rare to find time that we are able to get together and discuss some of the challenges and road blocks preventing completion on projects. Working collaboratively allowed us to find novel solutions and provide 2i reviews internally in order to move tasks forward.

photo of two seagulls in Wales

Working from home

Since Covid-19 struck with a vengeance, most of us have been working from home or have adopted a more hybrid way of working.

Whatever your working patterns you are still at work and therefore must still look after your health and wellbeing. This week the Health & Safety Executive launched their home working guidance, so we thought it was wise to share it here:

Home or hybrid workers, should still:

  • look after their stress levels and mental health
  • use equipment like computers and laptops safely

The Health & Safety Executive has lots of advice for home workers, which includes a video and practical tips on good posture when working with display screen equipment.

photo showing a stressed lego man at work

Other things we’ve been working on…

  • Sophie’s been outlining objectives and resources as we begin creating learning materials to help the organisation better understand what is required of them legally for content to be considered accessible and in turn, publishable to the website. By reviewing questions and feedback received by our inbox team, we can create content that meets user needs and supports our own objectives of improving the standard of work sent into our team. We want to work with people across the organisation to fill a gap and create interactive learning materials to help everyone better understand the expectations around accessible content.
  • We also published our Business Plan for 2024-2025 as an accessible HTML webpage on the website
  • Alex and Heledd have arranged and chaired 2 workshops on NRW’s approach to digital payments
  • Alex is working on the scope for next steps for NRW’s approach to digital payments
  • With Heledd’s return from leave, Owain was able to make progress with the Team being able to access to Google Analytics Google Tag Manager. All that is left is to ensure the Team has access to all our Dashboards on Looker Studio, without having to share the dashboards individually with the Team.
  • Two issues had been reported with our Designated site search, where the documents for two sites weren’t displaying. We are legally required to ensure that this information is available for the public to access. Owain had completed all the work with reviewing the Designated site search tool and correcting the two sites.