Folk Awards

Mike Harding

Presented by Mike Harding and Julie Fowlis, the awards show takes place at The Lowry Theatre, Salford on Wednesday 8 February and will be broadcast live onBBC Radio 2and the Red Button.

The ceremony, which includes performances by The Dubliners, Christy Moore, Don McLean and Seth Lakeman, will celebrate the folk highlights of the last 12 months, including awards for Best album, group, musician, live act and Folk singer of the year. There will also be lifetime achievement presentations plus the announcement of the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk award winner.

June Tabor&Oysterband are jointly leading the way with four nominations, following the release last year of their album Ragged Kingdom. They are nominated in the categories Best Group, Best Album, Best Traditional Track for Bonny Bunch of Roses and June Tabor is also nominated in the Folk Singer of the Year category.

Also winning four nominations are critics' favourites The Unthanks in a year which has seen the release of their fourth album Last and an acclaimed tour with the Brighouse&Rastrick Band.

Masterclass

This is the secondBBC Introducing Masterclassfor music makers, from the most famous recording studios in the world - Abbey Road and BBC Maida Vale studios.

The Masterclass focuses on inspiring bands and musicians about the music industry. Music producers, promoters, publishers, record label execs, managers, agents,musicians, remixers, DJs, and BBC talent worked together with two hundred bands and musicians.

Being Human

Comedy-drama series about three twenty-something housemates trying to live normal lives, despite struggling with unusual afflictions - one is a werewolf, one is a vampire and the other is a ghost. Meanwhile, The Old Ones are coming! View an extra episode ofBeing Humanon the BBC Red Button straight after the TV episode.

Dickens in London

Dickens in London presents five short plays based on Charles Dickens' journalism about walking in London to tell the story of the writer's life.

Adapted by Michael Eaton, the cast stars Samuel Barnett, Alex Jennings and Antony Sher each taking their turn to play Dickens. Following Dickens' changing relationship with the city that fired his imagination, each stand-alone play takes its title from one of Dickens's own appellations: A Not Over-Particularly-Taken-Care-Of-Boy; Boz; the Sparkler of Albion; the Uncommercial Traveller; and The Inimitable.

CBBC Extra

CBBC Extra is the home of exclusives. Watch funny clips, out-takes, star interviews, pop music, backstage previews and episodes from Children's BBC.

CBBC Extra website

News Multiscreen: Video Choice

Each weekday BBC News' On Demand team will be rounding-up the day's strongest news pictures to bring viewers a two-minute package of highlights. On weekends thetone becomes more conversational when Red Button viewers can watch a topical interview in 'Five Minutes with...' or a round-up of the week's weird and wonderfulvideos in OddBox.

• Video Choice: Weekdays (available around the clock)
• Five Minutes With... / OddBox: Weekends (around the clock)

BBC News website

CBeebies Red Button

BBC Red Button welcomes younger viewers and grown-ups with a sense of adventure to the big, bright and fun world of CBeebies interactive!

Now your children's favourite characters are at the heart of the interactive TV experience. Satellite and digital terrestrial viewers will have slightly different offerings from one another. This has enabled us to offer the best games tailored to each system.

CBeebies Red Button is available now on the CBeebies channel, and via page 5900 on other channels.

Cbeebies website

Available on Freeview and Sky only

BBC Sport Multiscreen**

Catch up on all the latest Sport via the BBC Sport multiscreen. Headlines are available around the clock with up to five additional streams available to cover the best that BBC Sport has to offer.

Please note that Red Button sport timings are subject to change at short notice.

For the latest information refer to theBBC Sport website.

Highlights

• Rugby Union - Six Nations Forum. Analysis of all todays Six Nations matches.
• World Cup Skiing - Live coverage of the Men's Slalom from Chamonix.
• American Football - Live coverage of Super Bowl 45 from Indianpolis with commentary options.

**Note all Red Button times are subject to change at short notice

On the Autumn open post,Russ asked:

When did the BBC drop the 'Text only' option for the homepage?

Whether or not to provide a Text Only version of a webpage is an interesting Accessibility question. I established the Accessibility Team for public facing BBC digital services back in 2005, and we have been discussing that question since then.

At the time the BBC had two Text Only solutions which enabled users of early screen reader technologies and mobile browsers better access to BBC content. These were necessary because they were the days when BBC content was almost exclusively published in tables based page layouts.

Times have changed and neither screen readers nor mobile technologies depend on text only versions of pages.

The beginning of the end of Text Only started in 2006 when we, in an effort to improve the user experience for screen reader users, developed a new templating system called Barlesque.

This is now used on all BBC online content and in 2006 we launched theBBC Accessibility StandardsandBBC Semantic Mark-up Standardswhich were developed to improve navigation for screen reader users.

To ensure support of legacy assistive technologies and mobile devices, we kept a Text Only service live. However our solution,BBC Betsie, removed all plug-in content and images. This meant our users could not access the increasing amount of AV content available.

It’s worth noting that removing the layout in the browser now creates a similar linear experience to Betsie but without the loss of either images or AV content.

Lots of the othercustomisation featuresoffered by our text only services can be replicated in the browser, which is a better place for customisation to happen.

When online our users do not limit themselves to just accessing bbc.co.uk, so supporting a BBC only customisation tool does not reflect that the BBC is part of the internet and not an island. Customisation in general needs to move with the user sotools built into the browserorplug-inshave the potential to provide a better user experience.

With these reasons in mind it no longer seemed reasonable to continue the provision of a Text Only tool.

Betsiewas a great piece of technology and played an important role the story of bbc.co.uk and accessibility in general.

We did continue the support of Betsie up until 2010 to ensure legacy assistive technology users’ access, however richer and more immersive services meant the weight and sophistication of the average BBC webpage finally go too much for her.

She became unreliable and was therefore de-commissioned.

The customisation question itself has not gone away, but instead is evolving as we ask ourselves how connected second screen experiences could open up less accessible platforms by connecting them to accessible ones.

Gareth Ford Williams is the Accessibility Lead, Future Media

Mock-ups of the new BBC Sport site

My name is Cait O’Riordan and I am responsible within Future Media for the development of theBBC Sport Website, including our Olympic coverage. Today we have rolled out some major changes to how the site looks and works and I wanted to explain those changes and why we have carried them out.

This redesign is the first major launch of many this year as we get ready to cover the Olympic Games this summer. We are working on some really exciting developments, which will be showcased on the new BBC Sport website.

This redesign has concentrated on doing four main things:

• Creating a fresh website that better showcases the range of content we offer
• Prominent promotion of our fantastic live coverage from across the BBC
• Making it easier for our users to talk about our sport coverage
• Making it faster for our users to find our great content

We have tried to do this in a way that makes the site easier to use for the millions of people from across the UK and around the world who use the site every week and are confident it will. But we know that, initially at least, the site will take a bit of getting used to.

First major change in nine years

We have spent a lot of time talking to our audience to make sure we get this redesign right and the most consistent piece of feedback we got on the old site was that it looks dated. And that’s because it was dated. The last time we did a major refresh of the site was back in 2003– ancient history in internet terms.

The BBC Sport website is the most popular Sport site in the UK, attracting an average of 11.5 million browsers a week.

People who use our site regularly have their own ways of getting around it. I have been to a lot of usability testing, where we watch as members of our audience use the site how they would normally when they are at home or at the office.

I am constantly amazed by the number of different and convoluted routes that users take to get to the content they love. Now we have refreshed the site some of those everyday journeys have changed. We are confident that people will be able to find new and easier ways to the content they want, when they want it.

We have shown the new site to users and watched again as they have found their way around the new site easily and naturally.

As well as usability testing we have also done some online surveys with a larger group. We showed the new site to nearly 2,000 people, including regular users of the Sport website, and 80% said they preferred the new to the old, saying it had a modern look and feel with a clear layout.

Putting live at the heart of what we do

People use the Internet very differently now than how they did in 2003 and that is reflected in the reasons why people come to the BBC Sport site. While people continue to come to us for written sports journalism they also want the very latest statistics and live coverage of the biggest sporting events as they happen in text, video, audio and photos– complementing the BBC’s long heritage covering live sport on television and radio.

Pages likeour football live scores page showcase our new approach to live coverage– and more changes are coming soon.

Our new approach to live is woven into the whole of our new site– with our live coverage prominently promoted and labelled in blue wherever it appears. We have also made our live coverage more prominent across the site– for example including live football scores on the Sport homepage.

Improving navigation across the site

The major difference you will probably notice first is that we have moved from a vertical navigation to a horizontal one– with the sections of the BBC Sport website listed across the top of every page (underneath the links to the main sections of bbc.co.uk).

This has made it faster for our audience to navigate between different sports. We know that a lot of our audience has an interest in more than one sport but in the past there was no quick way to skip from one sport to another.

If you wanted to navigate from say Golf to Cricket, you had go all the way back to the home page of Sport and start again. Now the most popular sections of our site are just one click away wherever you are on the site.

Moving to a horizontal navigation also gives us a wider page to work with, which means more room for our great content, including larger pictures and bigger video. It also brings the site in line with other major sections of bbc.co.uk, which have a horizontal navigation, like BBC News and iPlayer. Horizontal navigation is also common across the web withGoogle,Facebook, andSky Sports just some of the prominent examples.

Ben Gilmore, Interaction Designer, shows me some early designs for our Olympic Schedule

Making choices

The horizontal navigation has less room in it than the old long vertical navigation, which means we have had to make some difficult choices and we didn’t make them lightly.

In order to make the navigation easy to use, we wanted to limit the number of items in the primary navigation to less than nine, to help people make quick choices about where they wanted to get to.

We tested earlier versions of the site with more items in the navigation and people found it harder to use, often missing the“More Sports” link on the right hand side.

We thought long and hard about the best way to choose which sites to include in the primary navigation, before settling on those that are visited most often over the course of the year and which we cover through the 12 months not just around specific events.

They are: Football, Formula 1, Cricket, Rugby Union, Rugby League, Golf, Tennis and Olympics.

The rest of the sporting coverage is now found via a button on the right-hand side of the navigation, called“More Sports”. Clicking on that button reveals a“drop down” menu with all our other sporting sections listed alphabetically. Again, the“More Sports” button is available from wherever you are on the site– making it easier for people to get from one sport to another.

Analysis from the relaunch of the BBC News website which took place in 2010 showed us that when the navigation moves from the left to the top of the page the audience became less reliant on it for all their navigation. Therefore, we ensured that those key sections we could not fit into the navigation– like the Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England homepages– were prominently promoted on the Homepage.

This refresh of the sport site does not mean we are reducing the breadth of our coverage– our journalists will be covering the same range of sports as they have always done. We’ve just changed the navigation to make it easier to move around the site wherever you are on it.

Doing more with less

One of the reasons why we are able to cover such a wide range of sports is that we have invested in technology which allows our journalists to spend more time creating great content and less time managing that content.

In the past when a journalist wrote a story they would have to place that story on every relevant section of the website.

A story about Arsenal playing Manchester United, for example, would have to be placed manually on the home page, the Football page, the premier league page, the Arsenal page and the Manchester United page– a very time consuming and labour intensive process.

Now the journalists tell the system what the story is about and that story is automatically placed on all the relevant parts of the site.

We areusing semantic web technologies to do this, an exciting evolution of a project begun with the Vancouver Winter Games andextendedwith the BBC’s 2010 World Cup website. It will really come into its own during the Olympics this summer.

It doesn’t end here

TheBBC Sport websitehas hundreds of different sections. We knew we wouldn’t be able to refresh the whole site at once so again we concentrated our efforts on the sections that are most used by our audience.

For example, we know that during the UK football season, the majority of the traffic to the Sport website is to the Homepage and to content inthe Football section.

That is why we have targeted our efforts here, withnew-look content pagesandan enhanced statistics offering that we will roll-out for other sports in the future.

A further 19 sections, likeCricket,Golf andWelsh sport have new home pages. We will also be redesigning the statistics pages that go with those sections in the coming months.

At the same time we will be rolling out the news designs on the homepages and statistics pages of the sports we haven’t been able to tackle in this relaunch– likeSnooker andDartsfor example.

You will still see some pages with the old design in amongst the new redesign pages until we refresh all the hundreds of sections of the sport site, which might be a bit confusing.

Change will also come a lot quicker from now on– we won’t be waiting another nine years to change the site. Instead of infrequent big bang changes we will be making iterative improvements to the site all the time. We will release new features regularly to the site, so the site will continuously evolve and change, hopefully in a way that is less disruptive for our audience.

Meeting to create the initial wireframes for the new site. Other high-sugar snacks are available.

Talking about sport

We also wanted to make it easier for our audience to talk about Sport and our coverage of it. The new site includes the BBC’s share tools module, which makes sharing content even easier.

Very soon, audiences will also be able to comment on sport stories directly on the sport site for the first time: emphasising the importance of the audiences’ voice to the BBC Sport website.

Talking of which, do tell us what you think

I know people won’t need to be asked twice to give us feedback on what we have done. Our audience is passionate about sport and how we cover it and we love that fact that you are more than happy to tell us what you think.

Other recent high-profile launches of the BBC website have started with a beta version of the site which has allowed people to try out the new sites before they were introduced. For technical and editorial reasons we aren’t able to do this for Sport so, for some, the change may come as more of a shock at first.

We have made some bold design decisions as a result of exhaustive audience research and we are really proud of the new site.

Now it is live we welcome your suggestions as to how the site could be fine-tuned in specific areas as well as general comments and reactions to the new design. Pleaselet us know your thoughts here.

All your feedback will be used to help inform the decisions we make about how best to fine-tune the new-look site as we move through 2012 and beyond.

Cait O'Riordan is the Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012

See also:

• Head of Sport Interactive& Formula 1 Ben Gallop's blog postabout the new site on the BBC Sport Editors blog
• Claire Stocks of BBC Sport Onlineresponds to comments on Ben's post
• bbc.co.uk/sport 2012 redesign Frequently Asked Questions