Web Advisory Committee meeting (June 19, 2013)

June 19, 2013–  MC 2018 – 3:00 p.m. 

Present:

Daniel Allen, Marta Bailey, Kirsty Budd, Michelle Douglas-Mills (secretary), Don Duff-McCracken, Chris Francis, Guillermo Fuentes, Alison Gelata, Chris Gray, Jim Johnston, Collin McIntyre, Liam Morland, Rose Padacz, Megan Saunders, Susan Shifflett, Terry Stewart (Chair), Andrea Sweet, Heather Wey.

Regrets:

Amy Aldous, Heather Anderson, Lisa Brackenridge, Cynthia Breen, Janice Cooke, Marlon Griffith, Karen Jack, Patsy Jenkins, Amy Meredith, Kris Olafson, Jonathan Woodcock.

Absent:

Nigel Henriques, Tammy Marcinko,  Paul Miskovsky. 

1. Chair’s Remarks

  • Liz is attending the Organize for Success meeting; thanks to Michelle for volunteering to fill in and take minutes.
  • Lisa Brackenridge will be joining WAC from Undergrad Recruitment where she is the newly-appointed Manager of Digital Initiatives
  • Jay Athia has indicated that he is no longer able to attend meetings but will stay on the roster to receive e-mail and read minutes.
  • The Chair reminded committee members that as representatives of their respective constituencies, they should share information from Web Advisory widely within their areas. 

2. Approval of Minutes.

  • The minutes of May 2013 were approved as posted.

​3. Busines​s Arising

  • Because of vacations and  time limitations, the report/update from the URL Shortener group will be presented at the July meeting.

4. Conference Reports (Healther Wey/Liam Morland)

  • Keynote: User Experience and Design
  • key take-away was to divide content into chunks (packages of content) v. thinking of it as a web page (blob)
  • Amazon is a good example of this
  • the concept of "blobs" is from print world thinking
  • Blobs allow one to be more flexible when presenting to different devices and can be more effective than just responsive design
  • One example is TV Guide that creates content in such a way that they can produce multiple versions/displays of content
  • Karen McGrane's presentation is available on video.
  • Questions/Comments
  • C: we may want to consider this in terms of "teaser" fields in the CMS on a more regular basis.
  • C: Gerry McGovern has written an article "Decentralized publishing equals amateur web management" that questions our practice of allowing many web-content managers to maintain our sites and suggests that ownership should belong to the communications managers within an organization.
  • C: Karen McGrane has a related article, entitled "Adapting ourselves to adaptive content"

  • DRUPAL SPEAKS - Aural User Interfaces

  • Drupal 8 will be the most accessible version of Drupal yet. Example: will read to user when method is invoked using drupal.announce JS method

  • This will be an excellent feature to help with accessiblity

  • Other features in Drupal 8 such as tabbing-manager, which restricts tabbing to only those tabs needed to complete a task

  • The Accessibility Conference-Guelph (Liam/Heather)
    • ​Accessiblity is a journey (Liam)
    • Derek Featherstone's presentation
    • Questions for any accessilbility problem:
      • Questions for any accessibility problem
      • What is the purpose?
      • What functions are there?
      • What information is being conveyed?
      • How do we do that for everyone?
      • Do we need alternative designs?
    • ​Liam demonstrated the example of how to rework maps to make them accessible; Compare: a map with javascripts with one that has buttons.  Or compare this map of Tim Hortons in Ottawa to a standard google map. 
    • Auditing AODA Web Compliance, U of Guelph’s websites (Heather)
      • ​Miranda Mafe's and Kent Hoeg's presentation
      • This presentation provided a status update of the plan. Deliverables include a tool-kit to audit websites, remediation best practices, and training. They also perform audits of the U of G web presence, providing remediation and recommendations. The goal is to enable ongoing adherence to AODA standards.
      • U of G purchased SiteImprove to check accessibility.  Better than WAVE because it will do an entire site, offers  time scans and shows all WCAG 2.0 issues in one report. It also checks for spelling, broken links.  It inventories PDF's and other doc's. Their cost was $30,000 for 1 year up to 100,000 pages. A free trial is available
      • Heather's Accessibility Conference Report is available
    • Questions/Comments
      • ​C: Library has been experiementing AChecker. It is free, can install yourself and is supported by the Ontario government. Also has a free API (WAVE charges for the API). 
      • Q: The Chair asked if an update from the Accessibility Group could be forthcoming at the July meeting.
      • A: Rose volunteered to do this.

5. Waterloo CMS Update (Heather Wey/Liam Morland)

  • Training/Support/Migration (Heather)
    • Heather distributed a WCMS Update for June prior to the meeting.
    • Questions/Comments 
    • C: Web Advisory members found the "What's New" lists very helpful
    • Q: Who gets these email updates from the WCMS?
    • A: Members of the uw-web mailing list.  Anyone is welcome to join.
  • Technical Update (Liam)
    • Upgraded to news versions of Features module and Workbench module
    • Fixed a number of bugs and are waiting for maintainers to patch their code
    • Hope to be back to developing new features soon;
    • WCMS team will be prioritising requests in conjunction with Web Steering.  The Chair suggested that he would ask that Web Steering get advice from Web Advisory on prioritisation and will ask for this at the next Web Steering meeting.
    • Questions/Comments
    •  Q: Our department used to keep web stats using Google Analytics.  How do we do this in the WCMS?
    • A: This is setup in the CMS.  Insert your tracking code in the Dashboard.  There is a "how-to" document on the WCMS section of the Web Resources Site. 

6. Digital Initiatives Report (Andrea Sweet)

  • DI has inventoried all CPA sites for accessibility
  • DI will document experience and share with other areas
  • Moving toward having  concrete dates for rolling out revised Visual Identity in the WCMS;  
  • Andrea will be connecting with the WCMS team. They need someone to take responsibility for theming/visual design in the WCMS team;  Collin McIntyre volunteered his services.

7. Other Business

  • Summer meeting schedule.  Members preferred to meet in July (and there are agenda items).  If these can be handled in the July meeting, the August meeting will be held over until September. 

8. Next M​eeting 

  • 3:00-4:30p.m., July 17, 2013. MC 2018 a/b

9. Meeting Adjourned at 4:20 p.m.