We spoke with Mark Kennedy, web development manager at Ulster University.
Can you give us a quick overview of your team and how it fits into the organisation?
I am the web development manager at Ulster University and the team I work within is within a wider creative services team. The creative services team has designers, developers, videographers, photographers and marketing/communications people. It’s like a mini agency within the University.
The creative services team is responsible for delivering the University’s brand proposition. We do everything from the websites to social media graphics, leaflets, t-shirts, and anything that touches the brand.
The creative services team is one of four departments within the marketing and student recruitment directorate. We have strategic marketing, which does a lot of our course recruitment and looking at industry statistics. Then we have Market Engagement interact with prospective students and develop their conversation with Ulster through a range of initiatives including School Visits, Open Days, Careers Fairs and Digital communications to support Faculties to achieve all their targets within the Academic Plan.
What are your teams’ specific responsibilities in terms of the website?
When I first joined in 2016 the major part of our work was to consolidate all of the web and digital touch points onto our current platform which is runs on Squiz Matrix.
That project took the best part of two to three years and we are where we are now, roughly 20,000 pages which is what we have being looked after by Silktide.
A series of core templates, style sheets and content containers drive everything. Squiz is quite good from the point of view that we have developed these core elements which all our content editors have been trained on. This ensures that nobody can go off-piste.
My role is to ensure we have full governance of the platform so nobody can publish unless it gets approved by our team through our workflow.
We do development and build out digital solutions on Squiz, but my team doesn’t publish content. We have an army of content editors in schools, departments, faculties, and research areas that publish and look after their own content.
What prompted you to purchase Silktide?
We had aimed to be fully WCAG compliant during the move to Squiz but it was initially the drive for accessibility wasn’t as strong as I liked it to be.
However, we have an equality, diversity and inclusion committee in the University and they have an interest in accessibility, so we started reaching out to them to say we are taking this seriously.
We did a few training sessions, initially around PDFs, and they bought into the idea to help us. This helped get further buy-in from senior leadership because they understood what we were trying to do and why we were trying to do it.
The government were saying that everybody needs to be WCAG compliant but we were not. So, we needed to do something about it because if we got a tap on the shoulder, we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.
The impetus was to make sure, as a government organisation, that we were complying and if the Government Digital Services came knocking we would be in good shape.
What were you doing before you got Silktide?
We were using a mixture of best endeavors and browser plugins to find out way with WCAG compliance on a page by page basis.
We also have a product, called Funnelback, that was part of the Squiz platform which did a lot of the WCAG checks. It was really powerful, however it wasn’t very user-friendly so we weren’t able to give this to the content editors without a lot of hand-holding.
Silktide on the other hand is very user-friendly and gives us the in-depth kind of feedback we need. Plus Silktide has a lot more to offer in addition to accessibility, such as the checks around content.
How did you hear about Silktide?
The Silktide Index was brought to our attention by a colleague within Digital Services and we set a target of getting to the top of the University League Table.
As part of our market research we looked at other vendors but they proved to be too much in terms of what we wanted and needed at the time.
Our initial goal was to concentrate on WCAG compliance.
How do you use Silktide?
We had so many issues at the start our approach was to focus on specific checks and flatten that specific issues to a point where we could get good visually indications when new issues were introduced..
We would look at any issues that appeared on multiple pages but were caused by a template or component issue. That way we might have had 10,000 errors on contrast caused by a component but if we fixed that component then we have fixed 10,000 errors in one go.
It was a case of interrogating what Silktide was telling us and then going for the low-hanging fruit and attacking those issues. When those were crushed, we got to a point where we could see any error spikes.
One of the things we do is test our templates before release. That way we can minimize potential issues and we then have Silktide as the safety net.
Now that the major issues have been cleared we can spot any new ones creeping in and get them fixed straight away.
What results did you get with Silktide?
When we initially started with Silktide we were sitting around the seventies in terms of position on the Silktide Index.
It has taken a lot of hard work and dedication from the team but I’m pleased to say that we are currently number one or number tow in the Index with an accessibility score of 99%
It is a real testament to the team as the Index is independent of any checks that are overridden in a user’s account so is a purer reflection of how good our web accessibility is.
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