Technology Services

Tag: Accessibility

  • “Click here” is bad

    —

    by

    jlencion

    One of the most often overlooked details when authoring documents for the web is link text. Link text is the “clickable portion of text displayed for a link”. As with most things, there are good and bad practices when it comes to crafting link text. It seems that, it is common to author a web…

  • Design and Readability

    —

    by

    jlencion

    fadtastic has two great new articles up about design and readability. The first, Who to Design For? by Steven Teskey, discusses whether designs should focus on users or designers. He writes, “It all comes down to personal philosophy, but I’d like to possibly open some doors on this issue, that you might not have thought…

  • New RSS XSLT

    —

    by

    jlencion

    The Gustavus RSS feeds received a facelift today through the magic of XSLT. To improve usability, when visitors access an RSS feed they will now be presented with an informative page containing useful instructions on how to use RSS instead of merely the RSS source code. Additionally, to promote the adoptation and recognition of the…

  • Giving form updated

    —

    by

    jlencion

    We’ve spent the last few months perfecting a new online giving system that ties into a separate new system we will be increasingly using to process credit cards. This will save some people here a lot of time, which is always a good thing. Additionally, while we were switching to this new system, we redesigned…

  • Shorter, smarter URLs

    —

    by

    jlencion

    Today we began more widely implementing the mod_rewrite apache module to rewrite some of our ugly URLs. For example, the URL for a news story previously had been http://www.gustavus.edu/news/index.cfm?id=1658. That very same story can now be accessed at http://www.gustavus.edu/news/1658. Likewise, Eric Dugdale’s class schedule can now be accessed from http://www.gustavus.edu/oncampus/facultyschedules/edugdale instead of http://www.gustavus.edu/oncampus/facultyschedules/index.cfm?action=view&username=edugdale. While this…

  • Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility with Firefox

    —

    by

    jlencion

    Patrick H. Lauke at Get Tooled Up outlines how Mozilla Firefox can be used in conjunction with the Web Developer Toolbar to carry out a preliminary accessibility review. Although awareness of web accessibility has steadily increased in recent years, many web developers are still uncertain about how to evaluate their sites. The relative complexity of…

  • New onCampus pages

    —

    by

    jlencion

    The Gustavus onCampus pages are intended to serve three distinct on-campus audiences: students, faculty, and employees. They have evolved from being a mere collection of useful links to an aggregation of important information and online tools such as calendar events, campus news, directory search, and local weather. We just put the new and improved onCampus…