Explain the form The most important first step for an accessible web form is the content around the form itself. Make sure your instructions are brief, clear, and set the visitor’s expectations properly. Explain what filling out the form is going to accomplish for them. In the example of a contact form, explain up front […]
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Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and Digital Communications has been increasing efforts to improve the accessibility of web content on umaine.edu. The term “accessibility” refers to our efforts to remove barriers that prevent access to websites by people who have a disability. This month, we talk about the challenges and opportunities […]
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The UMaine website design— ‘theme’ in WordPress terms— is complex, and there are known issues you may encounter: Importing events into website calendar We license a “content aggregator” feature for our events calendar software, which works to import events in a shared Google calendar as event web pages you may list in a umaine.edu calendar […]
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Most content updates on your website are fairly straightforward— you can navigate to a page, click “edit” in the top toolbar, and make your changes. But what if the content appears on every page of your website? The “Appearance” category of features in your WordPress dashboard is where you can edit content that appears on […]
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Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and Digital Communications has been increasing efforts to improve the accessibility of web content on umaine.edu. The term “accessibility” refers to our efforts to remove barriers that prevent access to websites by people who have a disability. This month, we acknowledge this can be an intimidating topic to […]
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PDF (Portable Document Format) files are a handy way to share documents that can be viewed, printed, and shared while preserving the original’s format. Most PDFs are created using office tools such as Google Docs or Microsoft Office, publishing software such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, or as images from scanned documents using network-connected copy […]
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Content on your website should appear as text on your web pages in most circumstances. At the same time, there are legitimate reasons why a document needs to be uploaded to your site, and to list those documents we provide additional options. Using the built-in resource library We cover the basics of using the “Resource” […]
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Web accessibility has always been a requirement for UMaine websites, and Digital Communications will be increasing our efforts to improve the accessibility of web content on umaine.edu in the coming year. The term “accessibility” refers to our efforts to remove barriers that prevent access to websites by people who have a disability. This month, we […]
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One of the content blocks we make available is a slider— a content area that allows for an image with a headline that links to something when clicked, complete with forward/back controls to “slide” additional images/headlines/links into view. Sliders (also known as carousels) are attention-getting, but ineffective for promoting multiple features— usability studies have shown […]
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While the UMaine website is designed to be used by anyone with a modern web browser regardless of whether they use a PC or Mac, the system we use to publish the website, WordPress, has features that work best in certain web browsers. In particular, we have found that users of PCs that have Internet […]
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