Background

The TUC's Unionscope tool is to help union organisers to work more efficiently, and to help prospective members work out which union is best for them to join. It's a database of UK companies that already have a union recognition, or that have significant levels of union membership amongst the workforce. Anyone can contribute to the database or use it for research.

Our brief

To prepare and produce a tutorial using Adobe Captivate to demonstrate Unionscope. The tutorial was to include basic admin functions, how to search for and add entries, and show an example of the use of the data created.

Our approach

The initial task was to go through the process of using Unionscope with the client, to fully identify the key points that the tutorial was to cover and demonstrate to its audience. Once this was done, a storyboard of the tutorial in full including explanatory notes was drafted, and agreed with the client.

Using Adobe Captivate to capture on screen activity, the body of the tutorial was recorded, with annotations and a voiceover then added to the project. As soon as all of this material was created and gathered the editing process was to ensure that the final tutorial would be suitably paced and feature all appropriate information, before the project was finally output for online deployment.

The strength of this approach means that the tutorials are available online, which a wider audience can now benefit from, and furthermore review again as and when they wish. The flexibility of the solution adopted means that the tutorials now lend themselves to be easily updated as necessary, whereas doing this to the printed materials can of course incur substantial expense.

Standards

The following default standards have been utilised:

• Closed captions for the hearing impaired
• Text to speech features for visually impaired users
• XHTML 1.0.
• CSS version 2.0.
• W3C Level Double-A conformance to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. (WAI-AA WCAG 2.0.)
• Designed to a minimum screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels
• Cross platform compatible with the following major operating systems:
  • Windows®
  • Macintosh®
• Operates in the following major web browsers:
  • Internet Explorer – Versions 8 and 7
  • Mozilla Firefox – Versions 3 and 2
  • Safari – Versions 3 and 2