Our Govt.nz team were thrilled to win ‘Best Plain English Website’ at the 2015 WriteMark Plain English Awards held in Wellington last night. This is the third year in a row we have made it to the finals of these awards but the first time we get to take a nice shiny trophy home.
It takes a huge amount of effort to make information about government services easy to read and understand, so for the team to win this award — which is the premier industry benchmark for high standards in plain English – is very gratifying.
We are also working on other ways to make the information on Govt.nz easier to understand. We’re looking at how we can use Easy Read — a technique for presenting information as images combined with text. We’ll be testing whether it helps people with low literacy, older people and people with English as a second language.
We’re still focussed on accessibility for people with disabilities (see the blog post, Accessibility and Govt.nz — time to pause and reflect, for our thoughts on this topic) and improving standards across government.
Well done to the team and keep up the awesome work.
