Sight Savers International Selects Percussion Software¡¦s Rhythmyx ECM Solution to Boost Website Imp

Sight Savers International Selects Percussion Software¡¦s Rhythmyx ECM Solution to Boost Website Impact


Rhythmyx enables charity¡¦s website to ¡¥work harder¡¦ for the cause


In a bid to boost the impact of its website, ensuring that it effectively conveys the nature of the charity¡¦s work, whilst encouraging support and involvement by volunteers and donors, Sight Savers International has selected Rhythmyx„§ Enterprise Content Management System (ECM) from Percussion„¥ Software to underpin a major redesign and content management project.

For over fifty years, Sight Savers International has been working with local partners to combat blindness and provide support to blind people in 32 countries in the developing world. In this time, the charity has helped restore sight to more than five million people and has treated over 85 million for potentially blinding conditions. Through partners, it provides education, counselling and training to those who cannot have sight restored.

Sight Savers International¡¦s aim is to upgrade their web presence to more effectively promote the charity¡¦s work, provide a channel for encouraging visitors to become donors and attract volunteers. The web team, led by Matthew Blake, was keen to ensure that the creation of content for the website became a fluid and streamlined process. For the organisation to reach its goals, it was important that multiple people, regardless of technical ability, in multiple locations, should be able to create compelling content for online publication. The charity wanted to introduce appropriate editorial and management protocols for its website and implement a system user-friendly enough to allow people with limited technical experience to become contributors to the website.

Explaining the decision to implement Rhythmyx, Blake points first to the solution¡¦s ease of use. ¡§We have very little technical competence in-house and run a number of marketing applications that the ECM solution needed to interface with. Of the solutions we looked at, Rhythmyx was, undoubtedly, the easiest to use for people with little or no technical experience. It also offered the scalability and flexibility we were after, integration with Microsoft Word, and industry-leading accessibility functionality ¡V a crucial factor for an organisation working for blind people.¡¨

Rhythmyx features accessibility support for disabled users for the product¡¦s content contributor interfaces. Using Freedom Scientific¡¦s JAWS Screen Reader Version 6, users can enter, edit, view, approve and publish content. In addition, Rhythmyx fully conforms to a wide variety of international standards (eg the UK Data Discrimination Act (DDA), US Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, UK eGovernment Interoperability Framework (e-GIF), W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) standards etc,) requiring compliant tagging throughout the user interface. Examples of compliance include providing accelerator keys, adding titles to frames, including alt tags for images, etc. This accessibility support is in addition to the longstanding support Rhythmyx has provided for publishing accessible sites for content consumers.


The revised Sight Savers International website will enable maximum accessibility for users with a range of disabilities. Rhythmyx enables enlarged text size, spoken delivery of web page content and even the use of tabs rather than a mouse. Blake looks forward to greater accessibility to more timely information for people both within and outside of the organisation.


A robust enterprise content management solution, Rhythmyx manages web content, documents, digital assets, portal content and scanned images. The solution offers rich functionality out-of-the-box, (allowing customisation to be focused on meeting specific needs) and easy on-going administration by IT staff. By delivering a range of pre-built application functionality through Rhythmyx FastForward for Web Content Management (WCM), Rhythmyx allows organisations to implement the functionality they need today, whilst ensuring that they can meet tomorrow's needs with an extensible, standards-based architecture.

Joseph Wykes, managing director, European operations, Percussion Software: ¡§The selection of Rhythmyx by Sight Savers International further validates the user-friendliness and flexibility of this award-winning ECM solution. We are confident that Rhythmyx will enable Sight Savers International to maximise the impact of its website as it continues with its life-changing work.¡¨

-ENDS-

About Sight Savers International
Sight Savers¡¦ support reaches individuals living in some of the poorest countries in the world. With nine out of ten of the world¡¦s blind living in the developing world and 75% of global blindness preventable or curable, the importance of Sight Savers work cannot be underestimated. The charity is headquartered in Haywards Heath, United Kingdom with teams working to raise funds in Ireland and Italy. .The charity has local operations in West, East and Central Africa, India, South Asia and the Caribbean. More information can be found at www.sightsavers.org.uk

About Percussion
Percussion Software's family of practical software solutions enables customers to maximise both the value and quality of their enterprise content through cost-effective content management, ease of content re-use, optimised delivery to multiple channels and increased efficiency. The company's flagship product, Rhythmyx, based on open standards, is the first Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution to provide cost-effective, multi-channel delivery of easily reusable content.

Percussion¡¦s portfolio of over 2,500 global customers includes, Bayer, Hitachi, IBM, MasterCard International, Motorola, Thrifty Car Rental and Toshiba. Its UK customers include, ARM Ltd, British Library, Cambridge University Press, DLA Piper Rudnick, ICI Paints, Misys Plc, NESTA, Newcastle Building Society, NSPCC, Natural History Museum, Nottingham Trent University, Symbian, Tate, University of London and Victoria & Albert Museum. More information can be found on the Web at www.percussion.com.

Percussion Software is a registered trademark and Rhythmyx, Lyrix, Active Assembly and De-Coupled Delivery are trademarks of Percussion Software. All other registered trademarks and trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.


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For more information, please contact:
Jim Hawker
Threepipe Communications
T: 0207 470 8830
E: jim@threepipe.co.uk