FreeCharity.org.uk provides free blog hosting and internet services to charities and the non-profit sector. Getting your organization on the Internet shouldn’t be expensive or complicated and we specialize in a simple and flexible publishing system that can be used with little to no training. Read more about our innovative blog hosting.

We also provide consultancy on larger projects, specializing in blogging, WordPress, perl, security and web accessibility.

On Saturday I met (and had the pleasure of photographing) members of Software Freedom International’s board at the end of their three day summit in Oxford where they discussed issues affecting Software Freedom Day. Some interesting discussions were held on OpenStreetMap, the involvement of open source in e-voting, the problem of language in inviting worldwide participation and the use of free software in education. If I brought one thing out of the experience it would be seeing people with a wide range of thoughts on free and open software putting aside any differences to further awareness of software freedom.

Each year the RNIB, on behalf of the Society of Information Technology Management, conducts the comprehensive “Better Connected” report on the state of website accessibility in local government. This reminded me of a website I often have cause to use, that proclaims it meets “Priority 2 level of the W3C Accessibility Guidelines“. If you make such a claim, it needs to be truthful. In the rest of this article I illustrate how the website fails to meet their claims, why accessibility needs to continue beyond a once off assessment and what you need to do to maintain an accessible site.

Continue reading “Web Accessibility in Local Government”

Discussion on the UKRiders mailing list lead me to investigate the use of Best Practical’s Request Tracker (RT) to manage FreeCharity.org.uk’s help desk functions. Whilst I’ve been a user of RT for quite some time now, I’ve never taken a serious look at one extension, Request Tracker FAQ Manager (awkwardly known as RTFM). RTFM integrates with RT and allows you to extract and store useful information for later use in other tickets. As well as allowing you to quickly respond to common requests, you should find yourself documenting knowledge previously existed only in the mind of a single staff member. My experiences follow…

Continue reading “How to build your helpdesk using Request Tracker”