Accessible, user-focussed content at Acas

The challenge

Acas primarily had a resourcing challenge. They have an excellent in-house digital team, but they needed some additional support for areas such as accessibility and content iteration for a limited time until they could recruit more staff. They engaged Scroll between April 2022 and March 2023 to provide this support.

Regarding accessibility, they had a significant amount of content in PDF and Word: formats that aren’t usually accessible. Given legal and organisational requirements around improving accessibility, they needed someone with a good understanding of content design and accessibility to address these issues.

Regarding content iterations, they had a significant backlog of iterations to work through. These updates were for a number of reasons, including stakeholder input, user research findings and questions from users. So Acas needed content experts to come straight in and start working on these.

What they say about working with Scroll

“Scroll’s content designers worked as part of Acas’s website delivery team. Their expertise was invaluable, and they played a full and active part in delivering user-centred content, improving accessibility and helping us develop and maintain our style guide.”

Kate McCaul, Head of Digital, Acas

How we worked

Two Scroll content designers worked alongside the permanent Acas digital team and another contract content designer.

The digital team had 5 content designers, 2 developers, 2 user researchers, a delivery manager and a product manager.

There was also a team of subject matter experts with Acas policy expertise who provided input on factual accuracy and good-practice messages.

The solution

• We converted existing Word and PDF content, such as templates or reports (see https://www.acas.org.uk/equality-information-report/html for an example), into HTML format, so that more users could access them. Some of this content, such as https://www.acas.org.uk/template-letter-to-an-employees-doctor, needed to be rewritten in collaboration with a subject matter expert, to help make the content more concise and relevant overall.

• We drafted content iterations, such as to https://www.acas.org.uk/resignation, based on stakeholder input, user research findings, and web analytics. This work often involved working closely with stakeholders.

• We drafted and informed style guide updates.