Author: Amy

We’re stoked to announce that we’ve been awarded Best Creative, Digital & Innovation Business 2023 at the Kent Business Awards 2023.

We’re so proud to be recognised as a leader in our category, and an important part of the thriving Kent business community.

We celebrated (minus our lovely Luci) at the Kent Business Awards Last week, with a host of other fantastic Kent businesses. It was a brilliant celebration of the diversity and range of small businesses in Kent, and great to meet so many like-minded and ambitious people.

Congratulations to all the other nominated businesses in this category:

• The Rum Company
• Brilliant Businesses
• Chambers Design
• Foundations Child Therapy

Here’s a sneak peek into our award-winning submission, and what makes Eggu so special:

Demonstrating expertise in digital and creative technologies

Digital and creative is what we do. Eggu has demonstrated exceptional expertise in digital and creative technologies, which has been recognised with the awards we’ve won throughout 2023.

Our digital design and development team is continuously evolving our skills, enabling us to create engaging and effective digital learning courses. Two members of our team are even currently undertaking Diplomas in Digital Design to help take our skills to the next level.

Our ability to highly customise rapid development tools (such as Adapt) means that we can offer a high-quality, creative and bespoke digital learning courses, for organisations and charities with a more limited budget.

Technical excellence and commercial success

Our commitment to technical excellence and innovation has translated into commercial success. By consistently delivering high-quality digital learning solutions that cater to diverse client needs, we have achieved positive sales growth, improved our market share, and increased profits year over year.

We’ve been delivering digital learning solutions for more than 20 years, and built our business on referrals and repeat clients, which speaks for itself.

Impactful client projects with a wider reach

Whether it’s helping pivot on a knifepoint (like our Ambulance Service clients faced

during the Covid Pandemic), bringing about cultural change and ending sexism in schools, or educating entire generations about sexual health and consent; we never shy away from an important topic, no matter how taboo.

Our work is empowering, liberating and relevant.

Here are just two examples of our impact:

Brook

Our Brook Learn platform hosts a range of online training courses, resources, animations and videos for teachers to support the delivery of effective relationships and sex education (RSE) in schools.

Year on year, we have seen a consistent increase in engagement with Brook Learn. Today, we now have over 32,000 users registered, and the rate of growth continues to rise.

Now Brook can easily track user activity data, which demonstrates an increase in user knowledge and confidence after completing Brook digital learning, with the majority of users ranking the online training as easy to access, useful, relevant, engaging and well-structured.

Brook Learn has not only helped to build brand awareness but has introduced the charity to whole new markets, with users in almost all local authority areas in the UK.

Furthermore, it has unlocked the opportunity to develop paid for content and market new education products to a growing list of subscribers. The latest figures for 2021-22 show that 36% of income at in education Brook has come from digital products developed with Eggu.

• Brook: My Best Friend Fund
• Brook: Consent

UK Feminista

Our work with UK Feminista was to create a series of bite-sized modules around how to challenge sexism in schools. This is a real issue for every school in every community. Sexual harassment, sexist language and gender stereotyping are commonplace in school settings, yet teachers report feeling unsupported and ill-equipped to respond. To date, the resource has had over 12,000 registered users with overwhelmingly positive feedback.

• 92% Found the training useful
• 91% Feel more confident about how to tackle sexism in the classroom
• 89% Would recommend this training to others

Want to find out more about our ground-breaking work? Why not check out out our egg-cellent portfolio?

Eggu is ready to push the boundaries, and create change

Let’s get cracking.

Part 4: Top tips for writing alt text

Welcome to our four part guide on accessibility for digital learning. In this fourth and final blog we will explore five key points you need to consider when writing alt text to make your elearning accessible for everyone, including those with learning, visual, physical and auditory difficulties.

Alternative text, otherwise known as ‘alt text’, is used to describe the appearance of an image on a page. This is applied so that screen readers can read aloud to visually impaired users throughout a course to describe what images are showing.

Alt text enhances accessibility across a variety of platforms, including social media – it also helps to improve SEO.

1. Describing the image

When writing alt text, you should think about:

• What is the purpose of using the image?
• What information does the image convey?
• Is the image relevant to the content it is sat alongside?

Remember, when describing what the image is showing, it’s not necessary to mention colours or shapes unless they have meaning to the content.

2. Length

Excessive detail is not needed – keep it to the point!

Alt text shouldn’t be more than 150 characters and should only pick out the key features of the image that relates to the content it’s placed with.

3. Grammar

Always write alt text in sentence case and include punctuation marks to indicate to a screen reader when to take a pause before moving on to the next section.

4. Charts

There is no need to say ‘this is an image of’. A screen reader will always announce to the user when there is an image before reading out the description.

The exception to this rule is for the description of a chart. Unless you mention in the description that it is a bar or pie chart and what it is showing, the user will not know what is being described to them.

If there is a particular source you have taken the chart from, you can always link to the site where the information of the chart is explained.

5. Where alt text is not needed

All images require some form of alt text.

If an image is purely decorative and is not adding anything to the content, you do not need to add a description. Instead, input one of the following:

• “”
• alt=””

Using either of these options will indicate to a screen reader that this image can be skipped.

If no text is written in the alt text, a screen reader will read out the name of the image file which may confuse the user.

What’s next?

You have now reached the end of our guide on how to make your digital learning fully accessible.

Refer back to any of our previous blogs in the series to further support your learning.

Part 1: Top tips for writing content

Part 2: Top tips for writing link text

Part 3: Top tips for design

Part 4: Top tips for writing alt text

Part 2: Top tips for writing link text

Welcome to our four part guide on accessibility for digital learning. In this second blog we will explore six key points you need to consider when writing link text to make your elearning accessible for everyone, including those with learning, visual, physical and auditory difficulties.

1. Avoid using URLs

It’s always best not to use a URL as a title for a link, as screen readers will read out the full URL, making it unclear where the user is being sent.

Instead, the link should reference the page title of exactly where they are going and what information is being recommended.

By having a link title that references the page, it also allows screen readers to easily go back to the link at a later point. Otherwise it would need to filter through all content to locate that link again.

2. Never use links within sentences

To indicate a link within a course, screen readers announce ’Link’ before reading out the link title.

If a link is within a sentence, this can confuse and break up the content for the user. It will also make it harder for users to locate a link again.

Therefore, it is always best practice to present links at the end of their related sections.

3. Avoid using single words for links

As mentioned previously, the link needs to detail exactly what the user will be visiting when they select it.

For example, instead of saying:

Eggu

Why not try:

Visit the Eggu website

4. Always use sentence case

Just like when writing elearning copy, always write the link text using sentence case. The only exception is when using a proper noun (i.e. name for a particular person, place, or thing).

5. Things not to say

Using phrases such as, ‘more information’ or ‘click here’, should never be used on their own as link text.

Not only does this not provide any additional information on where the link is being directed, forcing the user to refer to surrounding copy for context, terms such as ‘click here’ also discriminatively assume that the reader is using a mouse.

Such phases also make the content inaccessible for screen readers if a user requests only the links on the page.

6. Duplicating link text

It is important to never use the same link text to link to different destinations as this can confuse learners using a screen reader.

This can also make it difficult when the users wants to search for only links throughout the elearning. Here, the screen reader will read out the link twice and it will therefore not be clear where the individual links will be directing them to.

What’s next?

In part three, we’ll look closer at the importance of accessibility within all design aspects of your digital learning.

Part 3: Top tips for design

Part 1: Top tips for writing content

Welcome to our four part guide on accessibility for digital learning. In this first blog we will explore four key points you need to consider when writing content to make your elearning accessible for everyone, including those with learning, visual, physical and auditory difficulties.

1. Bullet points

Bullet points are commonly used to introduce a list of points or itemise items in numerical or alphabetical order.

They can also be used to draw attention to important information, making it easy for the reader to pick out key points when scanning content. It is important that bullet point content is written in a way that a screen reader can read successfully.

Therefore, make sure to keep the following in mind:

• Always capitalise the first letter, with the exception of lists using a semicolon.
• Make sure to use punctuation, such as a full stop at the end of each bullet point, to indicate to a screen reader there is a pause before reading the next point. If you do not do this, the screen reader will read the bullet points as one continuous sentence.

2. Fonts

Although it can be fun to play around with different font types to jazz up text, this can cause issues for accessibility.

People with learning difficulties, such as dyslexia, can find it difficult to read text where letters are too close together, for example. This is also the case for capitalised words, e.g. “THIS IS THE TITLE”.

For easy reading, Sans Serif fonts are recommended, such as Arial and Comic Sans. These fonts appear less crowded, meaning it is easier to identify the individual letters being used.

3. Styles

The use of italics is not recommended for accessibility purposes as italic words become slanted, and the letters appear to have jagged lines making it more difficult to make out the words clearly for some users.

Instead, try using a bold type to highlight words of importance. This is easier to read and can also draw clearer attention to the content.

4. Quotes

Usually to visually indicate a quote, we might use quotation marks, and the source name is placed underneath. However, in this format, a screen reader will read the quote out as if it was just another sentence, making it unclear to users this content is a quote.

It is therefore important to explicitly state that forthcoming content is a quote from a certain source, before the quote itself is presented.

What’s next?

In part two, we’ll look closer at how to write link text for effective digital learning.

Part 2: Top tips for writing link text