Release notes: Citizen Space v6.4

Citizen Space v6.4 was rolled out to customers in the week beginning 5th July 2021.

This release contained a whole suite of changes to Citizen Space, including accessibility tweaks, even more functionality in Citizen Space Geospatial, and other security improvements and bug fixes.

Read on for more details...

A range of accessibility tweaks

We always test the accessibility of any product features we develop, but this time we've made multiple accessibility improvements across Citizen Space as a direct result of our most recent accessibility audit, which has been carried out for us by the inclusion consultancy Tetralogical.

The tweaks we made include improvements to:

  • aria sequencing for a better screen reading experience
  • fact banks in high contrast mode
  • markup on the matrix component
  • better focus indicators on survey buttons and more.

These fixes help to make Citizen Space work better for everyone.

Citizen Space - for all sorts of different engagement activities

We know that many of you do much more than formal statutory consultations, and we see Citizen Space being used for early engagement, informal surveys, information pages, sign up forms, and more. We've therefore started removing the word 'consultation' in the places where it isn’t possible to edit or configure the text.

We’ve been making these ch-ch-changes to bring more flexibility to your sites so that it's even easier for you to engage with your respondents, whatever the subject. This is something many of our customers have requested.

We're not done yet. There will be more places where we can make this change, but this was just our first sweep at it and hopefully it's a good start!

Further adventures in 'save and return'

In our Citizen Space v6.2 release we made some changes to save and return, and although there were some improvements, it also highlighted some different issues. So we went back to the drawing board based on your feedback and are rolling out some changes — say hello (again) to the new and improved save and return feature.

We've gone back to the simplicity of simply entering an email address to trigger a save and return email. 

However, now the confirmation page contains the information that is also in the email and emphasises that respondents will need this information to get back to their response. The email includes the one-click link to directly access the saved response as before, but also contains the Response ID and Response Key. This way if a respondent isn’t able to use the one-click link they can still manually enter their Response ID and Response Key. 

And to follow on from the above mentioned changes regarding the word 'consultation', in keeping with the whole 2 birds, 1 stone ethos, we've removed references to the word 'consultation' throughout the save and return process as well.

Improved glyph support in PDF reports

This means glyphs, like 'æ', emojis and other characters, will accurately appear in reports so that we can better support content being translated into Te Reo Māori, Gaelic, German and more.

Citizen Space Geospatial enhancements

There were also some feature enhancements released for Citizen Space Geospatial including:

Use multiple polygons to set valid areas

You can now upload more than one polygon to set the valid area where respondents are invited to draw on an interactive map. This ishelpful for valid areas that include multiple sites, such as islands.

Adding and editing layer attributes

In our v6.3 release we added the ability to add layer attributes from uploaded maps, meaning that you could effectively label features on the map with additional information. Now, you can add attributes to drawn layers as well! And to enhance this feature even more, you can also edit the attributes along with the feature's attribute values. 

Filter by map area in analysis 

When analysing responses that contain geospatial data you can now narrow your results down by drawing a 'filter area'. This allows you to only show responses which are located inside an area that you have specified.

Slight change to the wording in the Citizen Space privacy statement

The Delib section of the Citizen Space privacy statement was updated. We've removed the word 'anonymous' from the heading line 'Collection of Anonymous Browser Information' as it was potentially misleading, since the information outlined in the section may uniquely identify an individual under certain circumstances.

And much more...

This release included a whole lot more hidden improvements, including security fixes and the elimination of some bugs.