East Sussex County Council’s award-winning web team is celebrating another major success.
It has been awarded a coveted ‘See It Right’ logo by the Royal National Institute for the Blind – the first county authority to do so and one of only eight councils in the UK to have met the RNIB’s stringent criteria.
The award recognises the steps the team has taken to ensure that the county council’s website is accessible to all disabled people.
These include giving the partially sighted the ability to increase the size of text on the website – the on-line equivalent of providing people with large-print reports and publications.
The ‘See It Right’ award follows the web team’s success last year in gaining an internet crystal mark from the Plain English Campaign, putting it in the top four per cent of council websites for ease of reading.
Only two months ago, East Sussex County Council was praised by the influential Society of IT Managers which carries out annual audits of all 468 council websites in the country. The web team also earned further plaudits for its online coverage of this month’s county council elections which included an interactive map on which people could check results as they came in.
Becky Shaw, Director of Policy Management and Communication at East Sussex County Council, said: “It is very important to us that no one feels excluded from access to our website. We have worked hard to ensure everyone finds our site as easy to use as possible and are delighted this work has been recognised as high quality by the RNIB.
“The ‘See It Right’ and Plain English awards are among the most difficult in the industry to achieve. We are among a small, elite group of authorities to have won both.
“None the less, we are always looking for ways to make improvements and welcome any comments or suggestions from the public.”
You can check out the website at www.eastsussex.gov.uk
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