Digitalis’s Managing Partner and communications specialist Charlie Bain has seen the company evolve from its roots as a small but ambitious start-up in 2009 to the established digital reputation management firm it is today. He takes a few minutes to reflect on Digitalis’s unique approach to helping clients manage online reputational risk, and considers some of the emerging digital threats that may face companies and individuals in future.
Tell us a little about your background and how you came to work in the world of online communications.
I started out almost 30 years ago as a news and crime journalist before becoming a foreign reporter, with my career taking me to places such as Afghanistan where I covered the war in 2001, and New York where I covered the 11 September attacks.
I then joined, and ultimately ran, a risk management firm, advising clients on geopolitics and political risk in emerging markets. Towards the end of the 2000s, the growing focus on online risk led my clients to become increasingly concerned with managing digital and cyber-attacks that were affecting their businesses. With the digital world rapidly transforming at the time, it became critical to understand the then-emerging platforms including Google, Facebook and Twitter.
What skills do you and others in the Digitalis team use to help clients manage their reputations and protect against online risk, and how do these all come together?
Digitalis is all about helping our clients navigate the new information revolution: understanding the digital risks that affect their business, containing and protecting those risks, and then managing their reputations in the online world. My background in risk management equips me to foresee the dangers they may face, and my communications expertise comes to the fore in understanding and developing their online reputation strategy.
We have a tremendously talented team who all bring something unique to solving the issues our clients face. Our tech team develops in-house software to identify online reputational risk; our search and content experts use their comprehensive knowledge of every search engine to analyse online content and its potential threats; our digital investigators spot online attacks; and our client-facing team offers unparalleled analysis and advice.
Add to that a wonderful back-office team who look after us all, and you have a cohesive environment fizzing with creativity and ideas, focused on solving problems and making a difference to our clients.
What makes Digitalis so unique?
Digitalis is an incredibly collaborative company, and all the parts work in unison. We are not PRs, lawyers or cyber experts but we sit somewhere in between, uniquely equipped to solve problems within our lane of expertise.
With 65 employees, we are large enough to have a range of specialist skills to hand, but small enough to be agile and fix problems fast: recently one of our clients encountered a brand new search engine issue that we’d never seen it before, and within a week our Head of Search and his team had come up with a solution. When tracking disinformation and misinformation, our tech and digital risk team can work very quickly to devise strategies to investigate and track the source and amplification of the material, using sophisticated tools that are unique to Digitalis and constantly upgraded as we encounter new challenges.
A key part of online reputation and risk management is spotting emerging digital risks early. If you look into the future, what are the key issues clients might face in five or ten years’ time?
I think deepfakes and synthetic media will become a major headache as they enter mainstream use and the technology evolves. When people are duped into believing that a deepfake is a true representation of an individual, the potential threats are clear.
We are also seeing disinformation attacks move from state-on-state to corporates, and it’s vital for companies to prepare for this shift now, before it’s too late.
Finally, we are continually tracking security in the metaverse as this emerging platform begins to establish itself. It may sound far-fetched now, but we could see a day when having a digital risk and online reputation manager in the metaverse will be commonplace.
When Dave King and the early team at Digitalis launched the company in 2009, people asked if Google was around to stay. Believe me, it will be around for many years to come. The pace of digital development shows no signs of slowing down, and the Digitalis team will continue to uncover and monitor new threats as they emerge, whatever form they may take.
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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