There probably aren’t many spammers on this list, as I’d just undertaken somewhat of a cull at the time I ran this, having blocked around 40 people whom for one reason or another I had decided were spammers. Each image will link to the twitter account of the appropriate follower. Please note however that there almost undoubtedly will be some. So do have fun, but do be careful…

You can of course get your own twitter mosaic.

How

It starts by setting out objectives and metrics for using twitter — what do you want to achieve, and how will you know whether or not you’ve achieved it. This is a key issue: while I’m firmly behind companies, organisations and the public sector expanding into the use of social media platforms, it’s important not just do to it “because it’s there”: you need to know what you want to be getting out of it.

The objectives it sets out are to extend the corporate reach online; to provide a human voice of the organisation, to provide thought leadership, to demonstrate commitment to digital channels, provide a low barrier method for feedback, to monitor mentions of the brand on twitter, and to provide live coverage of events for those who cannot attend.

Sensible objectives, and ones which can pretty much apply across the board in the public sector, irrespective of whether you’re central government, local government, or residing elsewhere in the public sector. They also describe how they will know whether they are achieving these things — from feedback, from the number of followers, and also from mentions elsewhere on blogs. So indeed I’m helping them achieve those targets by talking about it here…

They also list tools that people might like to use to help this — twitterfall for real time monitoring, twittersheep to help understand more about who is following you and qwitter to see why and when people have stopped following you.

The policy then goes on to look at the risks and how these can be managed: can you meet the demands of people who engage with you on twitter, does your use of twitter ‘fit’ (i.e. not too ‘corporate’) and so on. One good example is the accusation of being accused of bandwagon jumping and doing something of little actual benefit — if you have set out objectives which you are evaluating your use against, then it’s going to me much easier to justify what and why you are doing.

Similarly, they look at security risks — both of the account being compromised and how to reduce the possibility, and also the risk of inappropriate tweets: the loose tweets sink fleets! idea and again what sort of policies and procedures need to be in place for this.

Similarly they have looked at the resources required for this:

The Digital Media Team will be responsible for sourcing and publishing tweets, coordinating replies to incoming messages and monitoring the account. This activity is expected to take less than an hour a day. Evaluation will take longer: approximately one day every 3 monthsTemplate Twitter Strategy for Government Departments, page 5

So far, the policy is all very sound and sensible. It’s pretty much a common-sense approach that anyone who has used twitter with any degree of regularity would be happy to recommend. They also demonstrate an understanding of what and how much you should tweet — you want to tweet sufficiently regularly that people want to follow you for information, but not so frequently that you’re flooding them with information they don’t want.

They recommend 2-10 tweets per day, excluding @replies and coverage of live events, which seems a very sensible level to be looking at, and they also understand that because twitter is seen as about sharing it isn’t simply a case of promoting your own message: if someone else says something which is relevant or worthwhile, you need to consider re-tweeting their message.

Consideration also needs to be given to how you will promote the twitter channel — when to include links to it, when to mention it and so on.

What

Then they look at what content should be placed on twitter. This is a key question and one where you would need to determine what is suitable for your own audiences — but for example unless there is a good reason not to, any press releases to the web would be tweeted about, as well as blog posts, key website updates, marketing and so on.

They also consider whether there is a need to add content with additional value — this is where twitter comes into it’s own as a ‘breaking news’ medium (with more traditional media, posts, or other blogs providing more analysis later) although obviously you have to run this through an appropriateness filter — which is why you don’t want to be in a position where it will take hours to get clearance to publish a particular tweet.

They look at the use of hashtags — when is it appropriate to use a hashtag? I’ll have to disagree with the guidance here: they say it’s appropriate for providing live coverage of events and for crisis communications. I think this is missing the point slightly: if a particular event or topic is being widely talked about with a particular hashtag and you do not use that hashtag, there is a significant chance that your communications will be ignored because they will not be picked up by people filtering for that hashtag. I think it’s important here to consider that you may need to use the same hashtag as other people when talking about something which already has a specific hashtag.

Obviously for anything governmental you have specific issues around elections, particularly during that period known as Purdah (the time between the announcement of an election and it being held, when any government activities which may be seen as promoting a particular candidate are suspended):

The same approach will be taken to Twitter as other comms channels during recess and Purdah. We let our followers know the reason for reduced volume of content with a tweet to announce the start and end date.Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments, page 9

Summary

And that is basically it. It’s all common sense guidelines that I agree with (although I’d maybe change the hashtag advice slightly), and it’s all stuff that regular users of twitter (particularly if they have been monitoring how it has been used by people representing organisations as well as individuals) will already have a fair idea of. The guidelines will probably most benefit those people who are less sure about twitter, particularly as the appendices provide information on what twitter is, how you use it, who else is using it, and a policy which includes two different options on following:

If you follow us on Twitter we will follow you back. This is automated. Being followed by us does not imply endorsement of any kind.

[Alternative, suggested by @scrumph (Sebastian Crump at COI)] If you follow @COIgovuk we will not automatically follow you back. This is to discourage the use of direct messaging, avoid resource wasting spam handling and so that you can easily identify other key Twitter users that we think are relevant to our industry and government in who we follow. However, being followed by COI does not imply endorsement of any kind.

Template Twitter Strategy for Government Departments, page 19

It’s obviously up to each government department how they want to manage followers, but I would strongly recommend that people consider the @scrumph approach (disclaimer: I know him). This is for three reasons: firstly because spammers will follow you, and if you follow them back it will< be seen as an endorsement of that account by some (irrespective of what disclaimers you publish to the contrary), secondly because if you do not follows spammers back it makes it easier for other people (and twitter itself) to identify these accounts as spammers and ban them, and thirdly because it means that the people you do follow people will know have been specifically chosen and are likely to have something useful do say (even if you do not agree with it or endorse it).

I would also urge that these guidelines be changed to recommend the @scrumph approach…

But other than those two minor things, these guidelines can be adopted pretty much as is by anyone else in the public sector considering how — and whether — they should start twittering.

New government guidance has been published urging civil servants to use the micro-blogging site Twitter. Launched on the Cabinet Office website, the 20-page document is calling on departments to “tweet” on “issues of relevance or upcoming events”.

BBC News: Government advice urges tweeting

Personally, I think this is a great idea. I think government — at national and at local levels — should look to take every opportunity to engage with the public — and actually try and get them interested and involved at whatever level you can. I think this should be part of a corporate communications strategy: not just using social media for the sake of it, but looking at the best way to communicate with citizens, bearing in mind different citizens have different preferences.

And while not everyone will want to engage online, a significant and increasing proportion will (waves hand) and for these people if you can engage with them online it’s frequently better in terms of reputation management than simply dealing with them over the telephone.

So the Template Twitter Strategy For Government Departments is available online to look at, should you want to.

If you’re going to use twitter, you’ve got to use it properly otherwise at best you’ll get ignored and at worst you’ll set yourself up for some habitat-style reputational damage. It’s important to best know when, and how, to use social media — don’t just use it because it is there, use it if it will add value to your organisation.

Obviously, not everyone approves of Government use of social media, and this is where the irony comes in:

I’m sorry but the government should get on with it’s job, not twittering, facebooking or myspacing. Really, anyone who uses these things must have no life

Mark from Lancashire, talking on BBC Have Your say, quoted on BBC News: Government advice urges tweeting

Right, so Mark thinks that anyone who uses twitter, facebook or myspace must have no life. But presumably that those people who contribute to BBC’s Have Your Say are an entirely different kettle of fish…

Pointless Twittery Thing #1: Cursebird

Yes, thanks to Cursebird you can now see exactly how much you swear on twitter. This is where you discover that the word “cunt” will crop up on 0.69% of my tweets, which was somewhat a surprise to me, as I didn’t believe it was a term I used with anywhere near that degree of regularity, although I am somewhat sceptical about the rest of them too: I’m not afraid to use the words “fuck” and “shit” when I believe it is appropriate.

But I don’t believe that over 40% of my tweets contain a fuck, and that a further 40% plus contain a shit. I have a sneaking suspicion that there’s something wrong somewhere, particularly since it’s supposed to be a ‘seven day overview’ and the list of tweets they highlight are arranged between February 1st and July the 11th — in other words, none of the sweary tweets they highlight were in the last seven days.

Mind you, I do like the fact that they say:

thepickards swears like a Scottish ComedianCursebird: ThePickards

…even if I am somewhat less convinced about the accuracy of this assessment.

Pointless Twittery Thing #2: TwitterCounter

TwitterCounter will count the number of people following you on twitter. This isn’t exactly impressive, as the basic twitter web page does this — and it’s even less impressive that the TwitterCounter numbers don’t seem to agree with the official ones, although as I know the count of people who I follow on twitter is wrong (by around 200), I’m not going to assume that TwitterCounter is the one which is wrong here…

What it does do is to indicate the average number of followers you have gained during a particular day, and estimate how many followers you will have after a given time period (defaults to 30 days). Like most of the rest of this sort of thing, it doesn’t really have much of a point, but don’t let that stop you from playing with it.

The Long, Slow Death of IE6

But of more importance to those of us in the field of web design is that that the accursed browser, Internet Explorer 6, is starting to be kicked aside. There will be those of you browsing from corporate council networks (you know who you are) where the IT department’s idea of being with the times is for you to be using Internet Explorer 6, which was released in 2001, has been superseded by Internet Explorers 7 and 8, has 22 unpatched security vulnerabilities, and is generally shit.

You people are the ones forcing the rest of us to continue support for this terrible product. You should all unite, kick up a big fuss, and demand to be shifted to a browser which at the very least works properly. Or even IE7, which is at very least a lot better.

If you design for Internet Explorer 6, your site will in all likelihood not look right in other, standards compliant browsers. What you should do is to design for a standards compliant browser, and add fixes for IE6. Which is a pain in the arse. As designers, we shouldn’t really have to provide support for an 8-year old browser with a collapsing market share, and mostly, we wouldn’t. Only it’s still used in some corporate networks for some bloody stupid reason and if you want people in these networks to be able to have your site look correct, you’ve got to put a bit of effort in.

Which is why I was delighted to find an article saying that You Tube are to drop support for IE6 and Digg are considering the same thing. That’s precisely what we need. We need a few of the bigger sites to take this sort of stance, to say that they will support decent browsers that at least come within spitting distance of being standards compliant, instead of the hodge-podge mess that is IE6.

It’s not like other browsers are not available. And free. And better. So let’s encourage people, where they can, to drop support for IE6, and then when the market share has collapsed that bit further, the rest of us can stop supporting this throwback too…

thepickards is 55% HeteroHow hetero are you? How hetero is Martha Stewart? Try out any Twitter name and get the real picture. Are we really the words we use? Hope to see you at Stockholm Pride!

You’re confusingly hetero. Your friends know. Your family know. You’re probably the only one who isn’t sure on where you stand.

Only now I’ve just taken a test from Stockholm Pride which analyses your twitterstream and attempts to work out how heterosexual you are, and it reckons I’m 55% hetero, which I’m not entirely sure how to interpret. Am I as camp as a row of tents, or is it just that part of me is a lesbian trapped in a man’s body? Some how I really can’t imagine that people perceive me as camp, but maybe those following me on twitter do…

Does it think that I’m a bear? I could maybe just about manage the working class masculine image, but I don’t really fancy tattoos and piercings, and somehow I don’t really think I’m cut out for the tight white t-shirts type. I do like Kylie and the Pet Shop Boys, but there’s no way you’re going to get me to watch Will And Grace.

To be honest, I really am fairly certain I’m straight — does anyone know what the official ‘pass’ mark is? And whether or not you can do a re-sit if you’re not happy that you’re straight (or gay) enough?

And is this something I need to tell the wife?

I’ve talked about this before, so I’m likely to skip at least some of my notes, but there was still plenty of stuff there which wasn’t covered in that original post…

Twitterplan

Lichfield Council originally set up a twitterstream called @LDC Planning which has 69 followers and shows the planning applications in Lichfield, but this prompted the question, how do you get only the planning applications you are interested in?

Using the API from Planning Alerts, which pulls out planning information from 321 local authorities, he was able to set up Twitter Plan, as an alternative method for those that find Twitter to be more instant and engaging than email.

Stuart then carried out a live demonstration of Twitterplan, signing someone up to the service — about the first time in the day anyone had tried to do anything online and had found that it worked. Now we’ll just have to wait and see whether @skepticmike reports anything back…

Other Bits

But he also insisted that while APIs are becoming more and more important, it isn’t just about Twitter Plan (lovely though it is). There’s Rate My Place which is a one stop shop for food safety information (albeit currently only for Staffordshire, making it slightly less use to me), but there’s also They Work For You, which you can use to keep track of your MPs and MSPs and so on and Openly Local which is much the same thing for local councils but at a much earlier stage (so far only 45 councils are included).

However, if one of the councils currently included is relevant to you, you can pick out details of individual councillors, including their committee memberships, a declaration of interests, party information, and a link back to the official page. It’s certainly something to keep an eye on…

At this point I must also remember to thank Goss Interactive, who have a very useful habit of providing pens and notepads at these events. Anyway, after that message from our sponsor, we’ll return to Al…

Al has produced his own what I think I said post, so you’re welcome to take it all straight from the horse’s mouth, or — since you’re here already, you could finish reading mine and then read his. Yeah, that seems like a better idea.

He started with “broadcast is dead”, but of course that’s not strictly true, it’s more a case of “broadcast as we knew it is dead”, because people can now broadcast their own message themselves, and people no longer trust “corporate” broadcasters in the way that they used to. (It used to be the case that something seen as ‘official’ would be more accurate; now it is perceived that official = spin).

People Say Bad Things

But people can, and do, say mean things. You can trust them to do this. And there’s no reason why we should expect their online behaviour to be particularly any different to that you’d find in the pub.

So you shouldn’t be too surprised if you run across a tweet which says something like:

Fuck the Newcastle council people!unknown

What do you do? How do you join in? Do you take the kick-down-the-doors approach, the ban-the-internet approach, and try and get the user banned? In practice, you have two choices.

There’s the do nothing approach, to avoid giving the people extra publicity — ask yourself whether you really want to have that particular argument in a public space?

When To Engage

Or do you do something? Do you engage or do you let it slide? Al suggested we use CitizenSheep’s method for deciding how to manage your online reputation. (It’s a nice simple flow chart, and it’s probably something which should be used as a staple for decision-making of this nature)

You have to decide what you can control. You can’t control what people are saying about you, but you can control how your staff use social media through acceptable use policies — it therefore can become a management or disciplinary issue if they act in an inappropriate manner.

And you have to understand when it is important to wade in. For example, that “Fuck the Newcastle council people!” tweet didn’t in fact refer to Newcastle upon Tyne: it referred to one of the Newcastles in Ireland… if @NewcastleCC had gone wading in here, they might have risked looking like idiots, so it’s important to be clear you’ve got the relevant facts before you begin!

Understand What You Are Doing

“Loose tweets sink fleets!”

It’s worthwhile taking the time to understand how a particular social media platform works, and what is, and is not, seen as acceptable behaviour (what’s the appropriate netiquette?) otherwise if you jump in feet first when you don’t really know what you are doing, you could make a complete hash of it like Habitat did (Note: see How Not To Use Twitter and UK Furniture company spams Twitter).

There was also the fuss over the offending Plymouth tweet, which led to Plymouth Council banning the use of twitter on their networks, and which many of us hadn’t seen until Al’s presentation.

@NewcastleCC on Twitter

Newcastle uses their twitterstream to give out information such as news, events, jobs and ‘extras’, with these extras being manually added information (responses, comments etc) rather than aggregated RSS feeds in order to help provide a personal as opposed to an entirely corporate face (as being too corporate puts people off –again, it’s likely to be seen as ‘spun’).

Newcastle were interested to discover that the news represented the most clicked links from their twitterstream (as opposed to jobs, which is much bigger on the website), and are separating out different types of tweet into different accounts — you have @toonlibraries representing the libraries, with other ones also being planned for events and customer service/local information.

“What does success look like?”

It’s difficult to know: but the Newcastle Twitterstream is certainly providing some people with useful information — it has more than 2,000 followers and is generating over 15,000 click throughs per … some unit of time (would have been helpful if I’d noted this down!)

And one for the future — while there doesn’t seem to be anything as yet resembling a hyperlocal blogging community on Tyneside, there are a lot of people taking photos and putting them on Flickr. So Newcastle Council are also considering using Flickr as a source of images from around Newcastle: if people on Flickr give permission to use their images, they might for example get access to tours of public buildings not generally available, or find their photo on the cover of the council magazine… (you need to be alert to the opportunities of social media as well as the risks)

I came across one of those quizzes (created by The Oatmeal) designed to tell me how addicted to twitter I am. I’m not quite sure why the number of people who are following me, as opposed to the number of people I follow, is deemed to be a good indicator of this, although I maybe have to concede their point on twitter clients.

So for all the rest of you who have been playing about on twitter, why not pop along to the quiz and see how addicted to it you are?

I am apparently 57% addicted to the thing. And yes, obviously I did tweet the results also, but this didn’t increase my addiction rating — I want to complain!

Simon has already put his slides online, so if you want more details about what he was talking about, you’d be better off visiting the horse’s mouth, as it were, but here I’m going to give you the thoughts and impressions that I picked up from my notes at the event…

First of all, Simon told us all where exactly Medway was: I’ve heard this before but for whatever reason it’s never stuck in my mind, so this time I wrote it down. It’s Gillinghamish.

Podcasting

He then moved onto Mixit Online (a ‘youth’ thingy), which started in 2006 as a kind of a first toe in the social media water where they produced a podcast for a few episodes in 2006 and 2007.

What they wanted to do was to create a two-way communication channel between the Council and young people in the area — to get the young people involved in producing the podcast and also to help the organisation learn about the use of podcasting as a communications tool. Initially, it was quite cheap to set up — the only thing they actually had to pay out for was a microphone for about £100.

The podcast was designed to be 20-25 minutes long, and contain a mixture of news, bands playing their music, features, interviews and comments.

What they learned from the exercise was that you shouldn’t underestimate the time investment necessary to do this sort of thing. It took 16 to 18 hours of officer time per podcast. They also needed to consider their responsibilities as regards to accessibility — providing transcripts and so on, and learned that it is important to use the most appropriate technology for the task — which was not necessarily what their IT departments wanted them to use.

They also found that each podcast was reaching between 350 and 400 people. And then they started looking at Facebook…

Facebook and Twitter

Rather than having the Council on Facebook as an entity in its own right (thus neatly sidestepping the issue of how to make people fans of the Council), Medway decided to use Facebook around specific events and started with a Facebook page for the Fuse Medway Festival.

Facebook and Twitter were used to promote the event, post pictures and footage from the event and so on. He indicated that they had included some stuff with a more personal slant, as well as just the standard event promo stuff.

They learned that Facebook is more than just an online billboard — it helps to create a community around the festival, but that as a consequence of this you obviously need to invest time in both interacting and responding to people — you need to offer value to that community.

This is where Simon said that they had offered things such as behind the scenes tours and queue jumping tickets for those who were using Facebook — the bit I made reference to during my accessibility section.

He felt that social networks are very effective for issues that people actually care about — for example Medway Council used these to publish their stance against the expansion of Heathrow — as well as just publishing lists of events, jobs and so on. You also need to be clear that you need to speak with a human voice instead of just corporatese.

Problems

One of the problems they encountered was how to manage the stuff they encountered online. For example, when they found a Facebook group was planning a party “Facebook Comes to Medway” at a pub called The Command House, and that there were planned to be over 3,500 attendees in a pub licensed for 300, they realised that there were obviously going to be problems.

So this was discussed with other people who needed to be aware of it, and after discussions with licensing authorities, the police and so on, it became apparent that the event could not go ahead (more details at Kent Online). Obviously, some saw this as a heavy handed approach, resulting in some bad PR for the Council.

So here they learned something about issues management, how to handle specific things (whether they can suggest/provide alternative venues), which groups they need to be looking at (for example, some groups with 10-15 members might never need more investigation: but in the case of a schools reorganisation group which attracted over 1000 members in one week, this is obviously one they need to be aware of and potentially engage with. It’s important to decide when it is appropriate to engage.

And there’s the issue of how to engage. They don’t normally engage directly with the groups on Facebook — if you suddenly chip in an ‘official’ stance when everyone is already against you, you might get shouted down or abused — so they might look at engaging with the creator or admins of a particular group.

Other Lessons

It’s important now to realise that new media — Facebook, Twitter and so on — can now drive “old” media, with stories derived from Facebook, Twitter and so on being monitored by journalists as well as councils to pick up news stories and features.

New skills are required; you need to have an understanding of how that particular form of social media works, you need to have new policies and processes to deal with it and use it effectively, and you also need to understand that it creates a disruption to traditional hierarchies. Hierarchies become flattened — online there’s no guarantee that people will find the Chief Executive’s opinion more compelling or more relevant than any other person, and online communities don’t generally do hierarchies — if you don’t treat the people you are dealing with as at least an equal, people will quickly turn away.

Secondly of course was the fact that my presentation was a series of slides with for the most part me talking off the top of my head about them (apart from a few quotes I had written down), and unlike every other session I wasn’t able to take copious notes during the speaker’s talk, as working out what I was going to say, trying not to go too fast, too slow, and not getting into a complete panic about the fact the internet thingy wasn’t working was taking up too much of my processing power to add writing it all down at the same time as well.

So, where did we begin?

Well, naturally we started with who I am, and then I moved into an introduction to Newcastle, since I was the first ‘local’ to speak. Although I say introduction, I just wanted to get all of the football jokes out of the way early on, so I got in my own mentions about Newcastle’s revolting away strip, Newcastle’s relegation, and welcomed everyone to St James’ Park, which is where the event was originally due to be held, although I’d have to recommend the Centre for Life as a conference venue.

Accessibility

Next up was a brief introduction to the reasons for accessibility: there’s a legal aspect to it, which is reinforced by the DDA (see 1995 and 2005 acts) which require that you must be prepared to make reasonable adjustments not to discriminate against someone with a disability.

There’s also a moral imperative — it’s the right thing to do, particularly for a council which has a responsibility to its own residents, and there’s a financial imperative — the “disabled dollar” is worth a bob or two (in excess of £80 billion).

There are also specific public sector requirements for accessibility — there’s the Disability Equality Duty for a start, then there’s what has been recommended by the EU…

…in a Resolution dated 13th June 2002, MEPs made reference to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the W3C and called for “all public websites of the EU institutions and the Member States to be fully accessible to disabled persons by 2003″.

With reference to the three levels of accessibility recognised by the WAI, the 2002 Resolution added: “for websites to be accessible, it is essential that they are double-A compliant, that priority 2 of the WAI guidelines must be fully implemented”.

Out-Law.com: Public sector websites to be accessible by 2010

And of course I’m sure that all public sector websites were fully accessible by 2003. Weren’t they? Well, weren’t they? It’s perhaps fortunate that they changed their message slightly in 2006, as the Riga declaration of 2006 requires the “accessibility of all public web sites by 2010, through compliance with the relevant W3C common web accessibility standards and guidelines.”

It’s interesting to note the use of the phrase relevant, rather than linking to a specific set of guidelines such as WCAG 1.0. This would mean that for now, we could assume WCAG 2.0 would be the relevant guidelines… until of course we see WCAG 3.0 become developed and reach formal recommendation status…

And then there are central government requirements for gov.uk domains — such as the Delivering Inclusive Websites document of 2007, which states:

1. The minimum standard of accessibility for all public sector websites is Level Double-A of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. All new websites must conform to these guidelines from the point of publication.
2. Websites owned by central government departments must be Double-A conformant by December 2009. [...]
3. Websites owned by central government executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies must conform by March 2011
4. [...]Websites which fail to meet the .gov.uk accessibility requirements may be at risk of having their domain name withdrawn.

Delivering Inclusive Websites

In other words, there are a number of very good reasons why you need to ensure that what you are doing is accessible.

The Social Media ‘Push’

There is an increasing push towards digital engagement; people expect to be able to interact with their council in an increasing number of ways online. One of the key things to remember here is that there is no guarantee that they will come to you. If you have forum spaces, blog spaces, discussion spaces or whatever on your site, there’s no guarantee that they will be particularly well used: partly because anything owned by you will be treated with a certain amount of distrust precisely because you control it, and partly because if people are already discussing this stuff on Twitter or Facebook anyway, why should they sign up to one of your services that they might only ever want to use once? No: they’ll just keep whinging away on Facebook or wherever, so you need to meet them there.

If you don’t do this, people will still be talking about you online, and you’re simply — if metaphorically — clapping your hands over your ears and saying “na na na na na, I can’t hear you”, which isn’t a particularly grown up or sensible approach.

Like it or not, social media is happening, and you must engage with it.

But Is It Accessible?

No. Well, not really. Well, it is a bit. It’s better than it was, anyway.

So what are the problems as regarding social media and accessibility? I highlighted three of them — the CAPTCHA, AJAX and UGC.

Initially, the common CAPTCHA was a distorted word shown on an image which you had to somehow recognise and type in. This obviously caused problems for users with visual impairments, as if they couldn’t see the image, they were treated as an spambot and not allowed to register for whatever it was.

The use of CAPTCHA in this way is not actually that effective, as spammers can use things like optical character recognition or cheap manual work to get round a lot of them, and then you have other things like the Penis flood. Yes, the Penis flood.

Basically, Time magazine had an online poll which used reCAPTCHA — where you are provided with two words, one known to the algorithm, one not, with the unknown word being picked from old books to help transcribe old texts online — to prevent cheating and ballot box stuffing by automated bots. Only this caused its own problems…

What one group realised was that if they always labelled the unknown word with the same word, and they did this often enough, a significant amount of the unknown words would be labelled with their chosen word. And then, because these words would be identified with your chosen word, you could start using automated bots, submitting your chosen word. And of course they used the word ‘penis’ with the side effect that penises would be sprinkled liberally through digital texts.

Now technically, this didn’t actually work — and rather crucially I don’t think this was what I said — as although the people behind the scheme ended up still gaming the poll successfully, they in the end had to rely upon a brute force manual scheme. But despite that the ‘Penis flood’ story is too good not to include. You might also want to note that other people tell it better than me.

But the point still stands: if someone has enough desire to get round a CAPTCHA, they can.

With AJAX you have a rather simple problem: if your browser doesn’t support javascript (or only supports some), it may not work. If some javascript is blocked by a firewall for reasons of security, it may not work. If you rely on AJAX, you cannot rely that your application will work.

And with user generated content, it’s the user that is the problem. Just because it is possible for the user to provide an alt text for their image (I did so much want to say an alt tag to annoy any standardistas but I managed to resist) doesn’t mean that they will. So unless you are closely monitoring and updating any user generated content where appropriate, you may have problems.

And accessibility is improving: Facebook is working with the American Foundation for the Blind to make things more accessible:

Facebook is working with the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) to make its social-networking service more accessible to users who are blind or visually impaired [...] Facebook is also working with AFB on design changes. Still, Augusto [head of the AFB] admits the ultimate goal — full accessibility for vision impaired users — is “far from being attained”508 portal: Facebook to make site more accessible to blind

And in addition — and with some images of the same — I showed that the signups for Twitter, for Facebook and for YouTube don’t rely on a visual CAPTCHA alone — in each case you can now choose an audio CAPTCHA as an alternative.

I then highlighted one of the problems with social media sites: keyboard accessibility. If you are forced to navigate through a site such as Facebook or Twitter through means of the keyboard alone, you will find it very difficult to tell whereabouts on the page you are — you might be able to guess if the URL is shown in the status bar, but that’s far from being an ideal solution. They need to implement some solution which will use :active and :focus css highlighting, otherwise this is going to be a major problem.

What Can You Do?

What can you do to make these sites more accessible? Well, in some cases, not a lot. You can’t control the way Facebook presents information. But what you can do is make sure that whatever you put on your Facebook pages are also available elsewhere.

One the things Simon Wakeman had mentioned to attract people to sign up to their Facebook pages and groups was to offer special promotions not normally available — such as queuejumper tickets or behind the scenes access at events. From an accessibility point of view, I have to disagree with this idea: if you are offering prizes or promotions that you can only get at through an inaccessible site, I’d argue someone who can’t use that site could reasonably make the argument that you are discriminating against them.

So that’s not to say don’t use Facebook: it’s to say don’t have any offers or features that are only available on Facebook.

You can also help people make the best of their experience. You can give them advice and help in using these social media sites, but remember that in general if someone can’t use that site in the first place, they won’t be going to that site to try and find you.

But Facebook have provided some accessibility help — they have a specific page dealing with accessibility issues and advising how to contact them if you have problems using assistive hardware or software on their site. During the event, I listed some of these but I’m not going to do that here; I expect you all to understand how hyperlinks work by now…

Accessible Twitter

And then there’s Twitter. You don’t have to use the Twitter site to use Twitter. There are various applications which can do this sort of thing — dabr, TwitterFox, Tweetdeck, and, more relevant for this particular discussion, Accessible Twitter.

Accessible Twitter (@accessibletwitr) is a web-based interface for twitter, which is designed to be, well, more accessible. It’s put together by Dennis Lembree (@dennisl) who produces the WebAxe podcast and blog (@webaxe).

It is basically a much more accessible version of the twitter website — a list of the accessibility features can be found on the site’s about page.

You Tube

And then there’s You Tube. Try finding some sort of normal video piece on You Tube and watch it with the sound off. That is precisely the sort of value that people with hearing impairments will get out of many YouTube videos: buggerall.

And that’s simply because people don’t consider it. I intended to show a video here called Bob’s House, but owing to the internet failure, I was instead compelled to try and wing it, to describe how the video allows you to suddenly see something from a different point of view, and have a laugh at the same time. If you like, it was an attempt at audio description of a video I didn’t even have in front of me.

Of course, here I can simply provide it:

I’d be interested to know whether those attending at the event felt I’d managed to at least get the gist of this across.

But this also suggests another issue: if a video doesn’t have sound, stick at least one caption on it, to explain that it doesn’t come with sound. I’ve noticed recently that BBC News are pretty good at doing this. In addition, try and provide transcripts or descriptions of the information.

But there isn’t really any excuse, if you’re using You Tube videos, for not having them captioned. Because it’s easy. When you upload a video to You Tube, you also have the option to upload a closed caption file for that video. And there is an Easy You Tube Caption Creator tool and also a five minute video showing you precisely how easy it is to do…

For obvious, internet non-connection sorts of reasons, I wasn’t able to show this video, but that was perfectly okay because the video is just over five minutes long, and Dave Briggs (@davebriggs), chairing the event, had just given me a five minute warning to start wrapping up…

In Summary, Then…

The fault with accessibility and social media is the default. It can be made accessible — or rather it can at least be made more accessible. Accessibility is not an excuse not to use social media; it is instead a reason to understand and use social media properly and provide support to your users.

You should test your sites; test your usage of social media — and you should be testing and discussing requirements with disabled users anyway as part of your Disability Equality Duty.

You will fail. You will make mistakes. But it’s a bigger mistake to ignore the whole thing and pretend it will go away. Experiment, monitor, and set policy. Also, bear in mind you won’t reach everyone — for some people other channels (face to face / telephone) will always be their preferred option — but you might well reach more people than you think — for example at the Where Do You Think You’re Going? Digital Transport conference I was at the other week, someone from Nexus (who ‘sort out’ public transport in Tyne & Wear) informed us that over 1000 elderly people had renewed their metro concessionary passes online — maybe not a massive figure, but more than they had expected.

But you need to do it.

I then listed a few resources — WebAIM, Accessify, AccessifyForum, the WAI and WebCredible — whilst being aware I was missing out many others. And indeed am doing so again.

And then, finally, and for those who got the reference on my last slide

…I walked on down the hall…

…which was a slight misquotation of a lyric from The Doors ‘The End’ as I’d needed to work out some way to finish the bloody presentation.

And that was more or less it, although there was one question via twitter:

@davebriggs Can you ask him how evil <iframes> are?@lesteph

…unfortunately, I didn’t have the information to hand — the best I could manage was “well, there was a discussion about this on AccessifyForum recently where I am one of the moderators…” (never pass up a chance to pimp your services, and big up your knowledge!) “…and I think the consensus was that they weren’t actually too evil, but I’ll try and dig out the link and get back to you.”

So here’s the relevant forum thread, which does more or less say that they are pretty well supported now. You really ought to visit. AccessifyForum is a really cool forum, where all the hoopy froods hang out, and you might want to consider signing up. And don’t forget to look up @accessifyforum on Twitter while you’re on.

And that was it. Or at least, that’s it for now; I’m planning on blogging many of the other sessions later…