We love a good client success story. One of the most inspiring is the recent work carried out by the team at Chesterfield Borough Council to improve digital accessibility . Acting on the need for public sector websites to meet compliance with the accessibility regulations coming into force on the 22^nd September 2020, the digital team created a project to make the necessary improvements.

The result is highly impressive. In just three months Chesterfield Borough Council’s website has jumped from position 399 in Sitemorse’s quarterly benchmarking INDEX of UK local government websites to number six. This enormous leap reflects improvements in both accessibility and content quality.

So how did Chesterfield Borough Council achieve such impressive results? Here are seven things we learned from the case study.

You don’t need a huge team to make significant progress

One of the most surprising elements of the Council’s achievements is that only a core team of two were involved. These included a Digital Content Editor, who is responsible for content, and a web developer in the Council’s ICT service, who looks after technical aspects.  Working closely together and having the right people responsible for fixing content and technical issues respectively meant that the team worked effectively and efficiently. This example shows you do not necessarily need a huge team to make significant progress in improving accessibility.  

Taking a pragmatic and consistent approach works best

The methodology that the team followed to make improvements is actually very simple and highly pragmatic, but it has also been applied very consistently. The team dedicated one day per week – known internally as “Accessibility Wednesday” – to work through a huge list of issues. They then tracked progress on a weekly basis as they reduced the number of items to fix.

This approach involves:

• Identifying the list of issues that need to be worked through
• Prioritising those which are going to have the most impact in reducing the list, for example a style sheet issue can result in multiple errors
• Prioritising those the team know how to fix and leaving more complex issues for later.

Working steadily through a long list of improvements with prioritised issues first, at a regular time each week, might not sound rocket science, but it has worked extremely well in this case.

Measurement played an important role in driving focus and momentum

All though the process, the measurement provided through Sitemorse’s automation and reporting capabilities, has played a very important role in tracking progress and driving the momentum of the project. Using the Sitemorse INDEX,  the team were able to track their overall progress over the quarter and demonstrate to stakeholders the exceptional advances made. On a weekly basis too, the team not only used measures to see where they were overall, but also to count the number of issues that were still left to fix. Seeing progress each week through these numbers was very motivating for the team and validated the approach they were taking.

The scope moved beyond just accessibility

What was fascinating for us was to see how an accessibility project expanded in scope to take in other aspects of content quality. As the team started to make accessibility fixes at the page level, they also started to fix other issues that had been spotted by Sitemorse such as broken links. This wasn’t something that had been planned, but just happened. It was more efficient and satisfying to make all the improvements that that page level needed there and then, rather than make additional changes at a later date. The expansion of the range of improvements was also reflected in the Council’s spectacular rise in the INDEX benchmarking tables.

It was a learning experience for everyone

An interesting result of the project has been an upskilling of the team, learning about accessibility through the actions of carrying out fixes. The instructional videos embedded within the Sitemorse platform were also useful. Additionally, by working closely together, the content and technical leads on the project learnt a lot from one another about content and coding considerations and approaches.

On a wider note, the team now has a rock-solid methodology for improving accessibility and content quality that can be applied to other digital channels provided by the Council.

Digital rockstars roll their sleeves up

True digital rockstars aren’t always the most high-profile teams; in fact, many of whom we encounter are quite modest. However true digital rockstars do achieve great results. Here the mindset and attitude of the team can be important; we consistently find a “roll your sleeves up” attitude where teams get on with the work needed to make improvements and then show persistence in wanting to keep on going, are integral to success.

The Chesterfield Borough Council team are great examples of digital rockstars who put the necessary work in from the get-go.

Download the Client Statement

The success of Chesterfield Borough Council in improving the accessibility on their website is one of our favourite case studies that has a lot of useful learning points for all digital teams. Download the full client statement (no forms to fill in!) for more information.