Author: theonico85

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Semantic document outlines and heading structures

A laptop with some code on the screen

Last year, we had a big focus on accessibility – it’s vital that we are a diverse and inclusive organisation and it’s equally important that everyone can experience the Museum and what we offer. This is part of our strategic goal to engage and involve the widest possible audience. To meet this goal, we need to ensure our digital experiences are accessible to everyone.

In March 2020, we tested our website with real assistive technology users, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund as part of the Urban Nature Project. Following this, we released 25 separate changes to the main nhm.ac.uk website between May-September 2020, each one helping us get a step closer to meeting AA WCAG accessibility standards. You can read more about our work on digital accessibility here.

We could see from accessibility testing that the majority of our pages have the correct structure, and that where they don’t, there are only minor difficulties in navigating the pages. This led to me reviewing the document structure/outline of some of our pages on nhm.ac.uk as we knew they are not as optimised for accessibility – i.e. screen reader and keyboard-only users – as we would like. Continue reading “Semantic document outlines and heading structures”

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Jammin’ at the Museum: The “DinoJam”

The Digital Media and Marketing department at the Natural History Museum has started a blog, and this is our first post! Our department is made up of four cross-discipline product teams, with each team consisting of product managers, designers, developers, content writers, data analysts and marketeers. Our blog posts will give an insight into our work and life at the Museum and we hope you’ll find them interesting and useful!

On the 22nd and 23rd March the Natural History Museum held its first ever Design Jam. Organised by the Digital Media and Marketing department, the event was called “Dino Jam” to provoke discussion and to demonstrate a break from routine work. It had two main objectives: 1) to think of new ideas for our Dino Directory website (which we’re in the process of redesigning, by the way – keep your eyes peeled) and 2) to bring together as many people from as many departments across the Museum as possible. It was a very enjoyable couple of days where we learned a lot and took away loads of ideas which we’re hoping to progress in due course. Continue reading “Jammin’ at the Museum: The “DinoJam””