Nexer wrapped 🎁: Our highlights from 2024
Sales, Marketing and Events Manager
5 minute read
As the year draws to a close, here are our reflections on a jam-packed year of excellent projects, partnerships and events.
Season's greetings!
As we approach the holidays and the year draws to a close, it's a moment to pause and reflect on the developments of the past twelve months. We always try to focus on the impact of our work and how it shapes our team, and in this end-of-year wrap-up, we're excited to share the highlights, achievements, and collaborative efforts that have defined our 2024 at Nexer.
We ran a series of accessibility roundtables
This year, we hosted a series of accessibility sector roundtables, bringing together leaders from the health, public, and financial services sectors. The goal of these events was to create a space where we could openly discuss the challenges and opportunities for organisations and create some action points to drive progress in these sectors. In early 2025, we hope to run a follow-up event focused on the housing sector with our partners at Paper. Stay tuned for more info or get in touch with us if you’re interested in taking part.
We announced a new partnership with DISC
We were thrilled to announce our partnership with the Digital Independent Specialist College (DISC), a brilliant college run by charity Digital Advantage in Manchester that helps young people with special educational needs or a disability move into roles in tech and digital. This partnership has led to our first intern, Ryan Hill, joining us part-time. Ryan has been working across our development, QA, and Accessibility teams, bringing valuable skills and perspectives.
We continued to support regional apprenticeships
Our commitment to supporting regional apprenticeships has remained strong. We have continued to provide opportunities for young talent to gain valuable experience and skills in the digital sector. This year we’ve provided apprenticeships to Robin and Isabel, two T-Level students from Macclesfield College, and Iqra, a Software Development Apprentice joining us via Manchester Digital. Our apprentices have worked across whole range of projects this year, including helping set up an accessibility lab for our team gathering, and looking at some internal initiatives, including creating processes for building accessible word clouds and reviewing our sustainability data.
Our Optimizely partnership is flourishing
Our work with Optimizely has continued to grow through the year. We've been involved in several projects, including A/B testing for accessibility and developing new features to enhance user experiences. This has included large-scale platform migration and support for the Convatec Group, through our teams in the UK, Sweden, Colombia and India. Our partnership with Optimizely remains strong, and we look forward to more exciting projects next year!
We explored how AI can support accessibility and inclusion
The hype around artificial intelligence reached new levels in 2024, and as a team we made the decision to focus specifically on how the technology can better inclusion in the workplace, support users with access needs, and help local authorities create more efficient and people-centred services.
Lee Valentine and Chris Bush spoke at Manchester’s Digital Strategy ‘AI for All’ event about inclusive design principles for AI, and we joined the follow up event showcasing the findings of the People’s Panel for AI, a collaborative initiative from Manchester City and Council and Manchester Metropolitan University consulting the public to centre people in the AI conversation.
Last month we also ran a webinar on Microsoft 365 Copilot, sharing some of the work we’ve been doing with our Access at Nexer Employee Resource Group to look at how the technology can be optimised to support inclusion and employees with access needs. We plan to continue this work in the new year, starting with sharing the personas we’ve created to help surface the right tools to help specific users.
We ran fantastic projects with our clients
This year, we have had the privilege of working on some fantastic projects with clients such as the University of Cambridge, AstraZeneca, Research Data Scotland, Historic England, The National Lottery Community Fund and Royal Holloway, University of London. These projects have ranged from cloud infrastructure development, workforce diversity research, health data visualisation tools, to creating user-centred services and data access platforms.
You can read our case studies for the year on our website right here.
You can read our case studies for the year on our website right here.
We contributed to NHS England's Accessibility Lab
We are proud to have supported the development of the NHS Accessibility Lab. This dedicated space champions inclusivity and equipped NHSE teams with the tools and knowledge to build accessible services. The lab has been a significant step forward in promoting accessibility within the organisation.
We expanded into Europe
We have spent time in Sweden, Germany and Denmark to raise awareness around the European Accessibility Act (EAA). This expansion has allowed us to bring our expertise in accessibility to a broader audience and help organisations comply with the upcoming legislation. We have exciting growth plans for next year to increase this delivery outside of the UK, and support Nexer's Swedish clients on making their products and services more inclusive.
We supported greener futures
Our collaboration with Greater Manchester peers on the Carbon Literacy Project has been one of the highlights of the year. We successfully ran a second pilot of the Digital and Tech Sustainability Toolkit, which has been well-received by participating organisations, and we’re looking forward to the official public launch event in January.
Elsewhere, Amy Czuba became the fourth Umbraco MVP (Most Valuable Person) in our team, awarded for her outstanding contributions to the platform’s sustainability efforts as part of the Umbraco Sustainability Community. We’ve also been doing some internal work on planet-friendly service design and will be sharing our updated sustainability strategy in the new year.
Camp Digital was a roaring success, and we're back for 2025
This year’s Camp Digital was a great success, as we welcome a fantastic selection of speakers and partners to the Royal Northern College of Music. Excitingly, we’ve now launched our event site for 2025’s conference, taking place on Thursday 3rd July.
This relaunch also includes a new look and feel, as we made the decision to refresh the brand, bringing it closer to our vision for Camp Digital as a warm and welcoming event, with the community at its heart.
This relaunch also includes a new look and feel, as we made the decision to refresh the brand, bringing it closer to our vision for Camp Digital as a warm and welcoming event, with the community at its heart.
And we’ve already got an amazing lineup of speakers confirmed…
- Richard Pope, Author of Platformland
- Hera Hussain, Founder and CEO of Chayn
- Matt Jukes, Lead Product Manager, Government Digital Service
- Claire Dellar, Accessibility Strategist, Wheelchair Tango Foxtrot Consulting
- Zeynep Engin, PhD, Chair and Director at Data for Policy
- Kanika Selvan, Managing Director of Beetroot Consulting
- Clara Parada, Founder of Purple Bonsai
- Hugh Wallace, CIO, Research Data Scotland
- Per Axbom, Designer and Communication Theorist
- Michael Palmer, Senior Product Manager at the BBC
With more to be announced!
These highlights capture just some of the exciting projects we've been lucky to support over the past twelve months. To our wonderful colleagues, partners, suppliers and customers who gift us these opportunities – we hope you have a fantastic festive break and a Happy New Year.
Stay tuned for exciting developments in 2025…
…now it’s time for us to raid the mince pies!