If you haven't yet seen the campus announcement regarding digital accessibility, please read that first and come back!
You can read more about the project here.
This specific project is to remediate websites hosted via UMBC Sites/WordPress for accessibility. We currently have just over 500 Sites! We have identified 85 Sites for phase 1 of this project as "top priority." These Sites were chosen because they are at the intersection of high use by our community (internal and external) and most in need of assistance. Phase 2 Sites have not yet been identified, but our goal is to assist all 500 Sites over time.
Yes, we welcome site admins who are seeking to complete their own remediations ahead of our schedule!
Leave a comment on this specific post we put up for community crowd-sourcing solutions.
Attend our weekly Sites Accessibility Drop-In Clinics, hosted online on most weeks. Head to our myUMBC events page to get the Webex link or calendar event for the next one!
This is a drop-in/drop-out setting where site admins working on Sites accessibility remediations can ask questions or just hang out and be in good company with other people who know what "it keeps deleting the title of the expander when I try to insert a paragraph" means.
Sites Project staff will be present at every call to help answer questions and offer solutions.
Fill out the UMBC Sites Support form to request assistance from Sites staff, and select "I need help remediating my Site for accessibility."
Sites' staff availability and capacity to support requests will vary, and we may not be able to assist you with your question or problem immediately.
Questions are not guaranteed to be answered in a first-come, first-served order. We will prioritize what we have the capacity for.
In some cases, we may ask you to wait until we are able to put you and your Site through the remediation process.
Silktide is the tool we are using to identify what accessibility remediations each Site needs, and it is available for you to use on your own.
If you haven't logged in to Silktide yet, this myUMBC post explains how to get started.
Silktide has a huge library of videos in its Academy that can teach you how to fix specific problems. They also link their videos to their accessibility checks, so you can typically learn what the problem is and watch a video training you on the solution in the same place!
The UMBC wiki now has pages on how to use and understand Silktide.
The Digital Accessibility site hosted by the Office of Disability and Accessibility Services has a page dedicated to website accessibility, which consists of tools and recommendations specifically for UMBC Sites and WordPress.
]]>Help us keep WordPress easy to use by decluttering anything no longer needed on your Site!
Related to this clean-up, there's an upcoming federal mandate that requires UMBC to ensure all digital materials are accessible. (Don't panic - more will be coming out about this soon, including information on what support UMBC will be offering to assist folks. Check out the Office of Accessibility and Disability Services' website for preliminary information.)
Free yourself of extra files and save time in the future looking for ones you need! It's okay to let go of that picture from 2012. (Example: A photo of the back of a server DoIT has been keeping since 2012.)
It's important that edit access to Sites is only available to those who really need it. Sites doesn't know when students have moved on or when colleagues have taken roles in a different department, but you do!
You can get ahead of the digital accessibility remediation process by removing old, inaccessible files – we don't want to have to remediate PDFs from 2014 anymore than you do, so trash 'em!
Users: Remove any Site administrators who are no longer working in or with your unit.
Media: Remove any PDFs, videos, images, and any other files no longer actively in use on your Site (Pro Tip: If you want to save the file elsewhere just in case, you can click its preview to open the attachment details and download it)
Slideshow: Trash any out-of-date slides. Don't forget to empty the trash!
