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Web Communication Open Lab

Web accessibility update

Washington State University websites must be accessible to everyone who attends, works at, and enjoys the University.

New policy and procedures govern web accessibility

WSU recently updated its web accessibility policy, Executive Policy #7 (EP7), and added web accessibility procedures. The new policy and procedures strengthen the University’s ability to make its websites accessible to a diverse community. They set standards for WSU electronic and information technology (EIT) that are consistent with state and federal accessibility guidelines, regulations, and laws.

WSU employees must uphold accessibility standards

It is your responsibility to ensure that content that you create or update for WSU is accessible and complies with the revised policy and guidelines.

Required training

Starting in January 2018, WSU will offer web accessibility training online. Registration information will be announced after the first of the year.

Training is mandatory

If you are a web developer, content publisher, editor, domain owner, or have any other role in updating WSU web content, the University requires you to participate in training annually. You must complete training before publishing WSU web content.

Please share this information

If you are not directly involved in your department’s web content development, please forward this message to the appropriate staff.

Support services

The WSU Web Communications staff offers services to help you make your websites accessible. In addition to online training, you can take advantage of monthly workshops, online resources, and in-person support.

Monthly workshops

Strong working knowledge of accessibility issues and requirements is essential for web communicators. These free monthly workshops keep your knowledge up to date.

JANUARY 2018 WORKSHOP

Writing for the web and making content accessible

Thursday, Jan. 4,
3:00–4:00 p.m.

Spark Academic Innovation Hub 212 (Pullman)

Live-streamed online (all campuses) This workshop introduces best practices for writing accessible web content. Whether you are a full-time web writer or you occasionally update content on your department’s website, you will learn how to create content that is accessible, organized, and succinct.

Register now

WSU web accessibility website

Bookmark this site! The web accessibility site provides resources for content creators, as well as scheduling and registration information for training sessions and workshops.

Web open lab

Fridays, 9:30–11:30 a.m.
ITB 2025, Pullman campus

Drop in to exchange ideas and get answers to your questions. Web Communications staff lead these weekly sessions. All are welcome to attend.

Online communication platform

Connect with more than 150 members of the WSU web community on the Slack communication channel. Join conversations, ask questions, and share solutions to accessibility challenges.

Open Lab coming to WSU Spokane

Hello WSU Spokane!

Web Communication will be on campus to help with any WordPress, online registration, or Qualtrics questions that you might have. All are welcome, so please spread the word. As always, please come when you can, and you stay as long as you like.

All sessions will be in SHSB 260

Wednesday March 15th –
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
3:00 PM – 4:40 PM

Thursday March 16th –
9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Open Lab in Spokane on May 4

The web team will be making a trip up to Spokane on Wednesday, May 4th for another open labs session. Stop by PBS 118 from 10am to 12pm or SAC 313 from 1:30pm to 3:30pm and join the fun. Bring any web related questions, we’ll bring a thing or two to talk about as well.

See you there!

 

Open Lab Recap, Spokane Edition – March 23rd

Today was our first open labs session at WSU Spokane! We had 2 sessions, the morning in PBS and the afternoon in Academic Services. We had a nice turn out at both and are looking forward to our next at the end of April.

Spine Theme Updates

We briefly touched on a few of the updates from yesterday’s Spine Parent Theme release. Most of them are tweaks to existing behavior and styles to provide incremental improvements. A couple are new – specifically background images on columns.

Join the WSU Web community

A Slack team is available for questions, discussion, and general collaboration. Anyone with a wsu.edu email address can join without an invite. We also have a GitHub organization available where all of our work is published as open source.

Background images on sections and columns

In the page builder interface, images can be added as backgrounds to both sections and columns. Click on the gear icon to add each. At the moment, you’ll need the full URL to the image. We have issue #292 open in the Spine Parent Theme repository to track improvements to this interface in the future.

Content Syndicate

We walked through the ins and outs of the WSUWP Content Syndicate plugin, which is enabled on all sites by default. We even updated the documentation to link to a better document for how dates can be formatted.

Managing Menus

We walked through the interface for managing offsite and site menus, including the process it takes to remove or rename “Overview” links in the menu. This is something we should document and we now have issue #296 open in the Spine Parent Theme repository to do so. The BU Navigation plugin is also available for a different way of managing pages in menus in a more hierarchical way.

Plugins

We went down the list of available plugins on the platform and walked through examples of Duplicate and Merge Pages, Gravity Forms, MailChimp, and TablePress.

Lunch

At this point, we took lunch and moved to a different location on campus to continue open labs. 🌮

Afternoon session

Some of the stuff we covered in the afternoon session is repeat or very specific to individual sites. I’m going to break things down into some bullet points here.

  • Basics and the future of the People Directory.
  • Using the WSUWP Content Syndicate plugin.
  • How events can be submitted through the Community Events plugin or managed without the plugin.
  • How to access the Edit CSS screen.
  • How to manage ticket numbers associated with work orders in Gravity Forms and possible conditional logic associated with that.

March 18 – Open Lab Recap

Hi there! Here’s a brief recap of the topics we discussed in open lab this week.

Spine Updates

Jeremy demonstrated the recent enhancements and bug fixes he has made on the Spine. Check out his post to read about the changes that have been made. They are slated to be released next Wednesday.

Menu Item Highlighting

Sheilah mentioned that if a page being visited is not in the site navigation, but is a child of a page that is in the navigation, that parent page should be highlighted as current. This issue has already been tracked on the Spine Theme repo (#228), but we bumped it up to high priority.

“Quarters” Layout Behavior at Smaller Widths

Sheilah bought up that four column layouts collapse down to two rows of two columns at smaller screen widths. We don’t want to suddenly change this behavior as it has been the default since (presumably) the release of the Spine, but since it is inconsistent with the other layouts – the columns should stack and all be 100% wide on smaller screens – we may add a utility class that can be added to four-column rows to make them behave in a more expected manner.

Content Visibility

Sheilah asked about the possibility of restricting a section of a site to be available to only a few specific users. Leveraging the WSU Content Visibility plugin is probably best way to handle such a task, but it would need to be able to support adding individual NIDs and apply a page’s settings to its children. These features were tracked as issues on the plugins Github repo.

University Taxonomies on Events

Phil bought up that it would be valuable to have the University Taxonomies attached to Events. This should be easy enough to do!

Email Services

We had a good discussion about the pros and cons of different email sending services and options. Many colleges and departments are handling their own sending, and those present today related their experiences with using MailChimp and phpList, and the merits of using UComm’s Crimson Communiqué distribution service.

Content Overflow

Javier pointed out that horizontal scrolling isn’t available when a page has content that is wider than the browser window. In such cases, the overflowing content is simply cut off with no way to access it. We weren’t able to find a fix at the time but will continue to troubleshoot the issue until we do!

Google Calendar Embeds

Joyce asked about adding support for Google Calendar embeds for one of her site users. We added this as a high priority enhancement (issue #31) to the WSU Embeds plugin.

Thanks to everyone who attended. Until next time!

Upcoming Open Labs Schedule (Including Spokane!)

We have a change of venue for our normal, weekly open labs next Friday. On March 18th, we’ll be in the CUB, room 208 from 9:30am to 11:30am.

Same format, same everything else, just a slightly different location. And who knows, if we like it we might try to keep it. 🙂

We’re also making a trip up to Spokane on Wednesday, March 23rd to hold 2 open labs sessions. One from 10:00am to 12:00pm in PBS 118 and another from 1:30pm to 3:30pm in SAC 313. If you’re in Spokane, stop on by!

March 11 – Open Lab Recap

Howdy! Here’s a recap of the topics we discussed during open labs this week. We’ll turn comments on at some point in the near future. For now, if you have any questions or suggestions, check out the WSU Web Slack team.

Background images on columns

Background images can now be assigned to columns in the page builder interface. Use the gear icon on a column to bring up the interface to enter the image URL. This is similar to how background images can be added to sections.

The background image itself will only take up the size of the content in that column. The equalize class can be assigned to a section to make all column heights equal in that section.

TablePress DataTables Row Grouping

We’re not entirely sure how to use this feature yet, but we’re looking into it. 🙂

Gradient backgrounds

While Marsha was showing off the work she’s been doing on https://hws.wsu.edu, we explored CSS gradients vs image gradients. ColorZilla provides a gradient editor, which is a good resource for generating CSS gradients.

Are testimonials worth it?

Sheilah brought up an interesting resource that seems to claim that social testimonials are better than talking about yourself. The UI of goodui.org is a little strange though, so it’s hard to tell if it really is bad. We seemed to have some group agreement that fake testimonials are bad, authenticity goes a long way. (And talking about the work you’re doing isn’t bad at all.)

More flexible roles

There are several roles and capabilities that need work throughout the platform. Joyce brought up an issue where some folks may only need access to add calendar events, but should not be able to publish posts and pages without review. We’re tracking our wishlist of future roles and capabilities on GitHub in WSUWP Platform issue #274.

People Directory discussion

We talked through some of the current status of the people directory, including the possibility of mass importing users by WSU NID. If you have examples for how you would like people records to appear when syndicated on your site, please chime in on Slack. We’ll be looking to add a couple other HTML templates soon to cover some basic cases.

Thanks everyone!

March 4 – Open Lab Recap

The session started off with Jeremy giving an overview on setting up and developing locally in a virtual environment. He also pointed out the Spine Child Theme Skeleton and the Plugin Skeleton as bases for people to work off of.

Topics discussed and bugs found

WSUWP Platform: Colorbox – a lightbox plugin for jQuery – is available on the platform via the Custom JavaScript Editor. Jeremy gave a brief demonstration on how to set up a basic implementation.

The Social & Economic Sciences Research Center offers a survey design clinic.

WSUWP Platform: The DataTables Row Grouping extension for TablePress has been added to the platform.

WSUWP Platform: The people directory, People Display and Content Syndicate plugins were briefly discussed. The people component of the Content Syndicate plugin will be broken out as a standalone plugin.

Spine Parent Theme: The templates aren’t set up to show authorship data from the Coauthors Plus plugin.

 

 

 

Open Lab Schedule – December 2016

With the pending slowdown of the holiday season, we’re going to pause open labs for a few weeks. Here’s the plan:

  • December 11, 2016 – Open Labs in ITB 2025 as scheduled from 9:30am-11:30am
  • December 18, 2016 – A more informal Open Labs in ITB 2006 from 9:30am-11:30am
  • December 25, 2016 – No Open Labs
  • January 1, 2016 – No Open Labs
  • January 8, 2016 – Back to normal with Open Labs in ITB 2025 from 9:30am-11:30am

If we don’t see you before the end of the year, have a happy holiday!