Coping with annual reports on the web
New medium, same old wording
Little research attention has been given to the quality of writing in online annual reports. This is a major oversight since words are the essence of web communication.
Material that has been written for print nearly always needs to be modified for onscreen readers. We have many detailed guidelines on this, the most important being 'shorten', 'simplify' and 'humanise'.
Even the best styles of print writing can appear verbose and turgid online, which doesn't bode well for the annual report!
Whereas in print interested readers are normally prepared to wade through a long, complex argument, onscreen reading conditions — including scrolling — discourage this. Web readers need the minimum amount of information necessary for them to achieve their goals as quickly as possible.
To see whether the wording of printed and online annual reports differed at all, DRCC carried out a survey of those produced by FTSE 100s for the year 2000/2001.
We found that, out of 50 companies selected randomly, 100 per cent chose to include their full annual report online — word for word. Most of the printed reports were converted into PDFs as replicas.
Several companies also provided the full report as an HTML document, but without any changes to the text. The only difference between the print and online text was limited use of hyperlinks.
A few companies included their annual review and summary financial statements online, in addition to the full annual report — usually in PDF format. Again there was no difference between the online and print versions, except for hyperlinks.
From an auditing perspective, and the team effort and costs involved in producing the printed version, such an approach is understandable. But it is publisher-centric, offering no favours to onscreen readers who are obliged to print out pages in order to process them.
The DRCC findings differ from those of a survey by the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) of the Fortune 100 companies which showed that only 58 per cent had voluntarily put their 1999/2000 full annual report online.
Another 14 per cent had chosen to include partial or summary annual reports. Within this 14 per cent, the parts of the reports that were fully included, partially included and not included varied widely.
Next: The chairman's message
Published : 01/06/2003
