By Dominic Jones | Published: February 22, 2007 | 
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Philips does good with 2006 annual report
By Dominic Jones
TWO years ago, I slammed Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (NYSE: PHG) for ignoring an academic study showing that users of its online annual report preferred HTML over PDF.
That piece was ever so subtly headlined: Ignorance, arrogance and Philips Electronics
Yeah, I know, I need to work on being more blunt in my assessments. Anyway, that article is a damn good read if I say so myself. So if you have 10 minutes, do check it out.
Then last year, I followed that humdinger up with this article: Philips Electronics gets annual report wrong — again
See? I’m improving. The second article was about the company deciding to put some parts of its annual report back into HTML — only the wrong parts, the stuff that no one reads.
This year, it is my great pleasure to recognize that Philips is back in my good books with a vastly improved online annual report for the 2006 financial year.
The entire thing is in HTML, with PDF chapters and some Excel. There’s also a nice Flash video summary letter from President Gerard Kleisterlee. See screenshot below.
It’s not the greatest online annual report, but it’s easily in the top 25% of online ARs I’ve seen in the past year.
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February 28th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Looks a lot better, but with so much Flash it is impossible to cut and paste info. Such an example would breach DDA in the UK too. Looks nice though I’ll give them that
February 28th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Ian,
Yeah, the accessibility sucks. But I’m still waiting to see the first fully accessible HTML online AR. I see lots of PDF versions claiming to be accessible. Not sure how that works when the PDF accessibility spec is still in the works, and the only study I’ve ever seen on PDF and accessibility says people with screen readers can’t or don’t want to use PDF.
I don’t find the Flash a problem because from what I saw there are text alternatives. The Flash letter, for example, is just a summary of the letter to shareholders, which is all text.