VLRC Case Study
The Victorian Law Reform Commission (VLRC) is one of Australia’s most active. Providing educational resources and regular updates on past and current inquiries, the VLRC website is an important resource for both community and legal professionals alike. VLRC rebranded themselves and their website to celebrate 20 years of reforming Victorian Law. The old website was outdated, and did not reflect their mission to make law and the justice system more accessible to society.
User research and experience design
Technical development and hosting
Nick Gadd
As part of the website build, Komosion custom built for us a special tool, the Konverter, that enables us to easily import long, complex documents,...
Our Approach
One of the biggest challenges faced by the VLRC in updating its web presence was how to migrate mountains of paperwork – in the form of PDF files – into a friendly online form. The aim was to create an accessible and professional look and feel, whilst also being easily navigable. This included:
Migrate roughly 15,000 pages
Create simpler navigation and shorter user journeys
Allow users to upload audio or video as well as text submissions
Showcase all current inquiries on the homepage
Prioritise the site’s accessibility
We embarked on broad-based user testing and design iterations, along with SAAS partner Amazon Web Services (AWS) and our software development team, to meet the brief.
Accessibility: Amazon Polly
We decided to use Polly – the AWS text to voice service – to achieve VLRC’s high accessibility standards: especially considering their Access to Juries for Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Blind and Visually Impaired inquiries. Polly will mean that all body content on the site is easily listened to regardless of whether a user has a screen reader.
The Komosion Konverter
Our bespoke WordPress plugin takes a formatted docx file, up to 700 pages in some cases, and converts it to perfectly styled html pages. Automatically generating a chapter index, breadcrumbs, and ‘previous’ and ‘next’ buttons which take the form of the relevant page names. It also produces accurate, linked footnotes. No other docx to html converter on the market does this currently. Thanks to Konverter, the VLRC can create a large report in beautiful html pages in minutes. Future content uploads can be done in a matter of minutes.