Chris Delaney takes a few minutes to discuss how Digitalis’s in-house technology team creates technical solutions that provide insightful data on online activity, giving clients the knowledge they need to protect their reputation, and making a meaningful difference to litigation support.
I have worked in software development for 20 years, beginning my career developing critical software for Heathrow Airport’s fuel planning. Since then, I have worked for a wide variety of companies large and small including BT, HP Enterprise, Barclays, and BBC Monitoring. Most of my roles have involved providing expertise to design and develop specific software that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
I started working with Digitalis in the early days over 10 years ago, when I helped build the first version of our online reputation management (ORM) software. I returned in 2016 to help develop new products and technologies, and in 2018 I became Digitalis’s interim CTO, taking up the position permanently in 2020.
My team works closely with the rest of the company. Being integrated rather than siloed enables us to respond more rapidly to client requirements. We can build tools to automatically extract public data from a website on a specific subject in a very short time, enabling us to gain insights into that data much faster than if a team of humans were reading and manually trawling through it.
Our Twitter Insights tool has been developed to extract data from Twitter and perform automated analytics that provide insight into what the data means. The analytics we generate enable us to detect potential bot nets and orchestrated disinformation campaigns, and even identify the origins of a campaign that has grown organically.
One of the important steps for us is to make the data we collect meaningful to clients and present it in a clear and digestible way. We translate complex raw data into a format that reveals where the issues lie, such as by showing the trend of a URL’s ranking over time, or the network of connections between accounts on a Twitter bot net. Our reports enable clients to understand the data, make decisions and take action.
Having the tech team in-house means we can adapt and respond rapidly to client requirements, using a bespoke software suite that provides exactly what we need and improves the efficiency of the team. When a new online platform emerges, we can quickly evaluate how complex it would be for us to investigate it, without relying on the lengthy process of having third parties come out with tools to do so. This makes it quicker for us to respond and get solutions out to our clients, as well as ensuring we have a complete understanding of the tools we are using and how to adapt them if needed.
There is a constant stream of new social platforms emerging, and we monitor them closely because those that take off can do so rapidly, becoming a potential hazard. Reddit is an example of an established platform that has experienced rapid growth recently, after events around the GME (GameStop) trading where it was used to manipulate prices, gaining widespread press coverage in the process.
New types of platforms are also frequently emerging: non-text-based platforms such as TikTok have grown hugely in popularity in recent years, and they can be more tricky to analyse and gain insights into.
Each trend carries its own implications due to activity ranging from manipulating stock prices to spreading disinformation or launching hate campaigns. As the GME incident shows, even established platforms can be used and manipulated in new ways, so we must ensure we remain well-positioned to respond rapidly to any changes.
For clients, managing their online reputation is no longer just a matter of checking their search profile and managing mainstream media. While text-based platforms such as Twitter and Reddit are still significant, new non-text-based ways for people to share their thoughts and messages, such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts, often make it more difficult for clients to respond.
It will become increasingly important to find ways of responding to these new reputational threats and detecting them as they occur. A vital part of my role as CTO at Digitalis is to ensure our technical team provides solutions that enable our clients to detect, analyse and respond to content across these new platforms to ensure they are protected both now and in the future.
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We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email webrequests@digitalis.com
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to webrequests@digitalis.com