Advice

Inclusion: Gender neutral icons

Ensuring your content is accessible is part of an inclusive communication strategy. Icons are an effective way to present options and features on your web pages to reach a broader audience. Label your icons Just as images on a website should be given text alternatives for web accessibility, icons should be accompanied by visible labels […]

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Accessibility: Auto-captioning with videos

Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and has been a regular feature in our monthly newsletter. With videos published to the campus websites, transcripts should be created and offered alongside the video. For many popular services (including campus systems such as Brightspace), transcriptions and closed captioning can be created automatically. While […]

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Accessibility and inclusion: Guidance for email newsletters

(Portions of this item originally appeared in our November 2018 newsletter) Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and has been a regular feature in our monthly newsletter — and ensuring your content is accessible is part of an inclusive communication strategy.This month, we focus on email, and pitfalls to avoid when […]

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Web forms and data collection

Due to the security risks associated with collecting and storing user data, website business owners should carefully consider how they use web forms. The University of Maine System Web Technologies Group has published guidance that explains the options available to content editors using WordPress, the content management system used for most public University of Maine System […]

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Planning for student project websites

Do you have students who will be creating a website as part of a team project or capstone? If the resulting website will become a resource for public use, it is important that this content is maintained within our campus WordPress environment and not a Google Site or externally-hosted domain. Before you get started, consider using […]

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Accessibility and inclusion: Creating social media graphics

Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and has been a regular feature in our monthly newsletter — and ensuring your content is accessible is part of an inclusive communication strategy. This month, we focus on tools that create graphics for social media, such as Canva. Creating graphics with text embedded Social […]

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Embedding videos

In our October newsletter we offered instructions to add Kaltura videos to your webpages. What about YouTube, Vimeo, and other websites where videos are published? The good news is that adding videos from other services is even simpler. Using oembed When embedding a video from YouTube or Vimeo, the website ‘oembed’ feature can be used if […]

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Web forms and spam

Do you receive unhelpful spam from your web forms? While there have been tools available that attempt to thwart the automated form submission robots that are responsible for this, such options have introduced barriers to visitors that rely on assistive technology. For this reason we had not allowed for the use of reCAPTCHA (a popular […]

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Accessibility and inclusion: Using content features for their intended purpose

Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and has been a regular feature in our monthly newsletter— and ensuring your content is accessible is part of an inclusive communication strategy. This month, we focus on how different website features should be used for their intended purpose Heading tags A well structured page […]

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Accessibility and inclusion: Text readers and #HashTags

Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and has been a regular feature in our monthly newsletter— and ensuring your content is accessible is part of an inclusive communication strategy. This month, we focus on how screen readers work with social media communication tactics such as “hash tags.” What is a hashtag? […]

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