You may have already received details from Ofsted of the planned changed to FIDy.
Our development team is currently liaising directly with Ofsted to understand the changes, and we will update customers once we have a plan in place.
Many thanks,
Directory Team
Image alt text, also known as “alternative text” or “alt attribute,” is a short description that is added to an image on a website. Alt text is intended to describe the content of the image to people who are unable to see it, such as those who are visually impaired and use screen readers, as well as search engine robots.
Writing good alt text is an important aspect of website accessibility and can also improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website. Here are some tips for writing effective image alt text:
By following these tips, you can ensure that your image alt text is improving both accessibility and the SEO of your website.
As per our recent communication, we have been made aware that an invitation to our Open Referral API workshop did not reach some of our customers, despite signing up via our website. We are sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused.
The session itself was not recorded, but we would be happy to meet with individual customers and provide an overview of the discussion and confirm our plans for the new Open Referral API. If you’d like to discuss this with us, please email socialcare@idoxgroup.com
Best wishes
The Idox Directory Team
As we continue to work with some of our long-term partners to redesign and rebuild their websites on our latest wireframe, we wanted to share with you, two of our latest websites for inspiration!
Trafford Council’s brand-new Local Offer is now live: Trafford SEND Local Offer
Also, Oxfordshire County Council has refreshed their entire directory, which you can view here: Oxfordshire Directory
Happy browsing!
Reading Borough Council wins Best Community Engagement, for its SEND Local Offer and Family Information Services (FIS) websites (delivered on behalf of Brighter Futures for Children), and Islington Council is awarded Best Directory for its refreshed Family Directory
The NAFIS Awards (National Association of Family Information Services) recognise and celebrate local authority achievements and transformative services delivered across the country in supporting families to access vital services and information. The awards enable FIS to share experiences and learn from one another about how to continually improve these essential services.
Idox is proud to support its local authority customers with our Directory platform, a market-leading solution that creates a fully-accessible SEND Local Offer, curates the best childcare information for families, and delivers critical information and advice to adults with social care needs. This, and our SEND EHC Hub, are already helping over 100 local authorities across England to deliver effective services across social care and SEND.
At the 2022 NAFIS Awards, Reading Borough Council was awarded Best Community Engagement for its SEND Local Offer and FIS websites (delivered on behalf of Brighter Futures for Children). This marks the second consecutive year that the Council has won at the NAFIS Awards, having taken home the award for Best Local Offer in 2021.
Community engagement is at the heart of Reading Borough Council’s strategy for delivering a high-quality information service, collaborating with local services to meet family needs. Developed in consultation with parents, carers, young people, and voluntary and statutory services, the Directory platform delivers vital information about services available to families, children, and young people within the local area. With more than 3,000 records in its FIS and Local Offer directory, local services work closely with the Council, ensuring information is accurate and up to date for the community to access.
Islington Council has won the award for Best Directory at the 2022 Awards. Family Directories provide high-quality local information, advice and guidance that support young people, adults, families, and carers to find the information and support they need when they need it.
The Council launched a refreshed Directory in the summer of 2022, creating a new look and feel and identity for the Islington Directory – Find Your Islington. Islington Council worked collaboratively with parent champions, residents, and voluntary sectors to ensure the new refreshed Directory met their needs. Idox was proud to support the Council throughout this project. Local families, many of whom are accessing the Local Offer and FIS websites on mobile phones, have already commented on how they appreciate the more modern, brighter layout and design, as well as easy to use navigation and compatibility with mobile devices.
It was the hard work and dedication to transforming this high-quality information service that has been recognised in this award.
Idox congratulates all the nominees and winners at this year’s NAFIS awards. We look forward to continuing our collaborative partnership with customers as they transform their FIS directories to deliver exceptional support to their communities.
Directory Platform Focus Group: Start for Life Channel
This is a workshop to bring customers together to look at requirements, gather ideas and establish whether, through a collaborative approach, Idox can develop a blueprint for a Start for Life directory channel
More details and registration are on our website. Click here to sign up
This is a workshop for customers to better understand your requirements for sharing your Directory’s data with third party systems/ suppliers such as Social Prescribing platforms
More details and registration are on our website. Click here to sign up
Thank you all who attended our Virtual Customer Forum last week. It was great to see so many familiar faces.
We hope that you enjoyed seeing what we’ve been up to in partnership with our customers. Here is a list of our latest customer websites for you to explore further:
https://findyour.islington.gov.uk/
https://www.calderdalechildcare.org.uk/
https://hsm.manchester.gov.uk/
https://find.redbridge.gov.uk/
https://infolink.suffolk.gov.uk/
https://directory.kelsi.org.uk/
https://families.newham.gov.uk/
https://directory.wokingham.gov.uk/
https://www.nottshelpyourself.org.uk/
https://servicesguide.reading.gov.uk
We are inviting our customers to come together to discuss all things Directory! In this session, we will present our platform development roadmap for 2023, including the results of our research to enhance the platform’s search function.
We are also keen to showcase some of the great new websites that we’ve been collaborating with our customers on.
The session will be held virtually through Microsoft Teams, on Thursday November 24th at 10am.
Registration is now open on our website through the following link:
https://www.idoxgroup.com/event/idox-directory-platform-customer-forum/
Following registration, we will send an invite with joining instructions.
If there is any specific topic or area that you would like to see included on the agenda, please do not hesitate to contact chris.evans@idoxgroup.com
We hope that you can join us.
Search engines use the headings within each page to index the structure and content of your web pages.
Users often skim a page by its headings, and screen reader software usually generates a navigable list for each page, using its headings. It is therefore very important to use meaningful headings to show the page structure.
Some sites will have hidden section headings. If a design excludes meaningful headings, we will routinely add in “hidden” headings as we build each new site. These hidden headings are then used by screen reader software, to generate its list for the blind user.
An <h1> heading is only used for each page’s main heading. Every major section of a page should be labelled by <h2> headings, then the less important <h3>, and so on as necessary, potentially all the way down to <h6>.
Headings are invariably relatively sized – to generate visual cues for their relative hierarchy. They are not a styling tool!
If you want some prominent text in the middle of your editable content, using a heading to achieve this will BREAK ACCESSIBILITY on that page. You can toggle your WYSIWYG field editor into ‘HTML’ mode and then add style attributes, like style="font-size: 2em" and that will not affect the accessibility in any way: styling adds no semantic meaning to the mark-up and is only for sighted users anyway.