06/03/2006 - At a prestigious
awards ceremony in London last night (2
March 2006), the Environment Agency’s SMURF
Project website (Sustainable Management
of Urban Rivers and Floodplains), based
on the River Tame through Birmingham and
the Black Country, received the Visionary
Design Award for Special Innovation from
Red Dwarf and Scrapheap Challenge’s Robert
Llewellyn. The Visionary Design Awards,
the UK website accessibility equivalent
of the 'Oscars', are judged and awarded
by the National Library for the Blind. They
recognise organisations that have worked
to make their websites easily accessible
to blind and partially sighted people across
the UK.
The SMURF website describes the issues
facing the River Tame and includes project
reports, maps and information. To make it
accessible, its designers solved technical
problems that were regarded as unsolvable,
in providing a Geographic Information System
that may be used by people with disabilities.
The Environment Agency invited accessible
web design specialists Communis to construct
the SMURF site, asking that it not only
be highly accessible to people with disabilities,
but also be made available in French, German,
Bengali, Gujurati, Punjabi and Urdu as well.
Urdu presented a particular challenge as
it is written from right to left, necessitating
the site design to flip around to accommodate
the language change. The greatest challenge
was the implementation of an accessible
Geographic Information System tool, WebSMURF,
using a combination of accessible Flash
animation and a sophisticated non-Flash
version.
The SMURF project was based on the River
Tame in the West Midlands - specifically
the urban area of the river catchment that
includes Birmingham and a large part of
the Black Country. The River Tame is a typical
example of an urban river - polluted, heavily
modified by culverting, straightening, re-routing
and with concrete banks and few natural
features.
Between 2002 and 2005 the project investigated
how implementing sustainable land-use planning
and water management techniques could tackle
the problems associated with urban rivers
such as the Tame.
Project Manager, Mark Scott, says: "I
am delighted and honoured to accept this
award on behalf of the Environment Agency
and the SMURF Project team. This is a significant
achievement for the team, who were dedicated
to making this website accessible to everyone
in the local community. They approached
the task believing that anything is possible,
and achieved what was considered to be impossible."
Further information:
SMURF Project
SMURF (Sustainable Management of Urban
Rivers and Floodplains) is a three year
partnership project that started in August
2002. SMURF is supported financially by
the EU LIFE-Environment programme. Project
partners include The Environment Agency,
Birmingham City Council, Severn Trent Water,
H R Wallingford, Staatliches Umweltamt Herten,
The University of Birmingham and Kings College
London.
The project was based on the River Tame
in the West Midlands - specifically the
urban area of the river catchment that includes
Birmingham and a large part of the Black
Country. The River Tame is a typical example
of an urban river - polluted, heavily modified
by culverting, straightening, re-routing
and with concrete banks and few natural
features.
SMURF aimed to tackle these environmental
problems on the Tame by integrating the
planning and management of land-use, water
quality, ecology and flooding. The methods
developed by the SMURF project will be used
as a model for work on similar rivers throughout
the UK and the European Community.
Visionary Design Awards
The Visionary Design Awards are part of
an ongoing campaign by the National Library
for the Blind (NLB) to encourage website
publishers and designers to consider the
needs of visually impaired people when they
are designing their sites. In all, 30 websites
were shortlisted for this year’s awards
in five different categories.
Further information on the awards can be
found at http://www.visionary-design.org/
