ONS Digital

Hello/Siwmae, welcome to this week’s round up of Digital Publishing activities at ONS.

Last week had a huge focus on social media in support of social media week, with the team running a number of presentations and drop-in sessions across each of our three office locations. The presentations were well attended. but take-up of the drop-in session were disappointing and so we are looking at how we can improve engagement in the events in February. Read more about social media @ONS

Over the weekend, we successfully deployed a series of web enhancements to move us closer to achieveing the accessibility standards. Some changes were to the design of the website, some to the underlying code and some are issues that will be addressed through in-house CMS training. These changes will greatly improve the way that people who use assistive technology, such as voice activation, are able to access and navigate the ONS website, as well as improving the overall user journey experience. The improvements are as a result of recommendations from Shaw Trust who were commissioned to perform an accessibility audit on the ONS website earlier this year. The report highlighted a number of areas where the ONS website failed to meet the required accessibility standards and a re-audit is currently scheduled for October.

Other news..
On Thursday we released a short story on smoking habits that was picked up online and in print. The Daily Mail chose to embed our chart, which was nice recognition of the work that went into it. Mark Easton also commented, describing it as interesting. Our ability to create content that users want to talk about and apply to real world people or situations is a powerful thing.

Our new audio-video producer has been getting to grips with our statistical portfolios, meeting with some of our digital enthusiasts and developing ideas to make our content more engaging

and finally….

As a result of the increased usage of infographics as a presentational tool, we commissioned a set of guidelines to help improve the quality and consistency of the infographics being produced. Our design team have been putting the finishing touches to this guidance, which we will share next week. Watch this space for details.