Grenseløs offentlig kommunikasjon : en undersøkelse om faktorer som påvirker hvordan offentlige virksomheter arbeider for å gjøre det kommunikative innholdet på nettsidene sine tilgjengelig for de fleste

Abstract

This master thesis intents to study which factors that influence how the public sector works with their communicative online content, and how they try to make the content accessible for most people. Through this thesis I hope to show which factors that are already implemented into their daily practice, and which factors that are not implemented well enough.The public businesses thatappear in this thesis is the Norwegian Labour and Welfare administration (NAV), The Norwegian Public Service Pension Fund (Statens pensjonskasse) and Stavanger municipality (Stavanger commune).In addition,I have interviewed one privateorganization, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and one language consultantfrom NTB Arkitekst, who providesa slightly different perspective.Theprinciples of universal design serves as the main backgroundfor this thesis, as well theoretical perspectives about context, communication, communication systems, websites, the literacy of the Norwegian population, plain language and multimodal communication. By conducting interviews and analyzing them, I have identified three main categories of factors that influence how the public sector approaches accessible web content: the contextualframework regardingcontent design,the recipientperspective, and the communicative content.The contextual framework regarding content design includes both internal and external factors.External factors include areas the businesses have little control over, such as the technical solutions,laws and guidelines and the expectations from the surroundings. Internal factors include the business’and its employees’attitudes and thoughts about the value of accessible content. The recipient perspectiveis abouthow the businesses shape their content based on who the recipients are, which includesidentifying the main recipients and their needs, and the intent behind the text. The communicative content is about the textual context, mainly how about the design of the text, plain language and multimodal communication.Themainfindings show thatareas that are well implemented already are;awarenessabout plain language, the intent behind the content, and the recipient perspective. Areas that would be beneficial to explore more are how one candesign content thatis accessible to most people, especiallybyusing a combination of modalities in the content design.