Web Content Community messages archive

Hi,
You might be noticing small text and other minor formatting changes to your webpages.

Same link text, different destinations

As part of our website improvement programme, we are addressing those links that have the same link text but go to different destinations.
The reason for doing this is that screen reader users will see links on a page listed without context. So we need to ensure the same link text is not used to point to different web addresses. Fixing these instances helps us to meet the WCAG 2.0 A 2.4.4 criteria.

What it means to you

You might see the text on your links change slightly.
We are only making minor changes to ensure the link is unique to the page, and to make it very clear where the link is going.

For example, a school page has a link in the side navigation menu called ‘Staff’ which is going to the school’s staff profiles. The same page also has a section link called ‘Staff’ that goes to a page with a smaller group of people. The ‘Staff’ link text also duplicates the main ‘Staff’ link in the website header which goes to the staff homepage.
In this case, we would rewrite the link text in the side menu to clearly label the staff page it is linking to, and also rewrite the link text on the section link to clearly describe the group of people that it is linking to.

If we need to make changes that will have a wider impact in some way, then we will contact you first to discuss the best way forward.

Other text and formatting changes

We have contacted you in the past about other text and formatting changes that we are making, such as unique page titles or linking to a new tab. We are still picking these up and fixing them as we come across them. So, it is possible that you may see other tweaks happening to your page.

Whilst we are fixing any instances that we come across, it is always better for you to be aware of these requirements in the first place. It makes sense that as you write and create your page, you can make sure that your content reaches the right user at the right time and in the right format.

Please keep referring to the Writing for the web guidance and keep using the Publisher’s checklist when you are writing or publishing to make sure that your page is meeting all the necessary standards.

Success! What you do matters

We know that these small changes may appear insignificant, but we are having a big impact.

We monitor our website on an index that compares us to other UK universities. As we have been addressing issues, and you have been updating your pages, we are making a huge difference!

In January last year, we were scoring 63% accessible and ranked 124th UK University in the index. By March this year, we had risen to 92% accessible and ranked 14th!
Your content contributes to our success and since January this year, the quality of content including writing, accessibility, and SEO has risen by 27%.

Thank you,
The Web Content Team

For editors and people who create and edit in Sitecore

Hi,

We (the Web Content Team) have a checklist that we use to quality control the pages we publish.

The checklist is based on accessibility and usability standards and practices, and help us to keep a consistent approach across the website.

We use the list as a point of reference to check that a page and its content is compliant with WCAG before we publish.

We’ve had a few queries about different practices from various teams, so we are sharing our checklist for all publishing teams to use and refer to.

As you might imagine, it’s a long list – but not everything on the list will be relevant for every page.

So, if you edit or create in Sitecore, please use our Publisher’s checklist.

Please keep coming back to it, because we regularly update the list to accommodate new WCAG standards, or new functions, or as we recognise content patterns that need a better and consistent approach.

Thank you,
Web Content Team

Hi Web Content Community,

We have recently enabled hyperlinks that open in a new tab or window to automatically display ‘(opens in a new tab)’ at the end of the link text.

This is to make sure that the website complies with the accessibility technique G201 ‘Giving users advanced warning when opening a new window’.

In practical terms, we recommend that we do not open links in a new tab or window.

This is because it:

• is disorientating for people that cannot perceive that the new tab or window has opened
• prevents the user from navigating back to their previous pages
• is difficult to manage and navigate multiple tabs and windows on a mobile

One of the most common reasons for opening a link in a new tab or window is when linking to an external site. Even when linking to external sites, we do not recommend using new tabs or windows – this is because it takes the user away from the LJMU website and they will not be able to easily return to our content. We recommend that the text of the link makes it clear that the user is leaving the LJMU site – see the ‘Linking to external sites’ section which is under ‘L’ and ‘Links’ in the LJMU online style guide.

As a general rule of thumb, we should not see too many instances of ‘(opens in a new tab)’ throughout the website.

There are a couple of exceptions to this rule and you will find out more in our guidance for writing and using links in the LJMU online style guide, under ‘L’ and ‘Links’.

What to do next

Please check your pages, and review whether a link needs to open in a new tab. If it isn’t essential, please change the link so that it no longer opens in a new tab.

If you have links that go to external sites, review the text of the link and update the link’s text so that it is more descriptive and lets the user know that they are leaving the LJMU website– see the ‘Linking to external sites’ section which is under ‘L’ and ‘Links’ in the LJMU online style guide.

If you or your editor are unable to change the link so that the ‘(opens in new tab)’ appendage is removed, or if you cannot update the link text, please send a ticket to the Web Content Team through the Helpdesk.

You will need to let us know the URL of the pages that need to be updated, and provide your new link text. We find it less ambiguous, and it will save time for everyone, if you copy and paste the webpage content onto a Word document and use the Track Changes tool to show us exactly what you want written - this reduces the chances of us having to ask for clarification and allows us to quickly and accurately publish your content for you.

Odd links

We are aware that there are a few instances where the appendage ‘(opens in a new tab)’ has repeated multiple times on a single link. The IT developers are looking into this and working on a fix. However, you could help by first checking that the odd links are written consistently and in the same way as the links that are working correctly.

Update about LJMU website accessibility ranking

We want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support in updating our website content in order to make sure that the site is legally compliant, and we know that some of the changes may seem like they are too small to have an impact. But your contributions are working!

We are monitoring our progress on an index that regularly measures the accessibility of all UK universities, and we are continuing to climb up the ranking. We have risen from 124th position in January, to the 48th position at the start of July.

These content changes really do contribute to this progression.

Thank you,
Web Content Team

Hi Web Content Community,

The Web Content Team is running a project to look at duplicated page titles on the website, and our reason for doing this is to ensure that we meet the accessibility criteria that requires a website to only have unique page titles.

A unique page title might seem like a small detail but it has a large impact on the site’s overall accessibility and usability.

The benefits of a unique page title are:

• better understanding - because the title describes the page’s content
• better understanding – when the title is read by screen readers in an environment without other visual prompts
• improved navigation - because people will know where they are going
• higher rankings in search engine results because a descriptive and unique title is easier to match to the users search terms

We have found nearly 300 duplicated titles, and the majority of these are a repeat of generic titles like ‘About us’ or ‘Our events’ or ‘Our staff’ and so on. We will be updating these title to be unique and more specific, for example, ‘About us’ will change to ‘About the xxxx team’.

We will not be changing the meaning or context of any page titles, and we will contact you if we come across a title that needs a bit of thinking around the subject.

We plan to change the page titles over the coming days and weeks, so if you see a slight change in a page title, this will be the reason why.

Looking forward, when you create or amend a page title – please make it clear, concise and descriptive.
If you’re at all unsure if it is unique, run a search to see if another page pops up.

You’ll find more guidance about page titles under ‘T’ in our Web content style guide.

Thank you,
Web Content Team

Hi Web Content Community,

We have introduced a new style for presenting a short important message and we plan to use the style consistently across our website.

The new formatting will become a recognisable signature for a message that must be read; and the new format is accessible to all users.

Why have we introduced this new style?

Throughout the website, there are multiple inconsistent ways for emphasising important and key information. Some pages use boxed text, some pages use coloured text, some pages use entire paragraphs of bold text. All of these are inaccessible, and the inconsistent approach means that our users can easily look past an important message.

The new style will be applied consistently so that our users learn the content pattern and recognise the format as something that they must not ignore.

However, it is important not to overuse the style - keep the style for essential and important information only. Too many instances on a page will water down the important message that you are trying to impart, and users will start to skip over something that is overused.

Here are some examples of what the new style looks like:

How a Sitecore Editor can apply the style

The style is called ‘important’ and you apply it in the Sitecore Rich Text Editor SiteCore by:

• highlighting the appropriate paragraph
• opening the ‘Apply CSS Class’ dropdown
• selecting ‘Important’ 

This will make the paragraph indent its left and right margins, and add a teal border to the left-hand margin.

Sitecore Editors and website authors

Please add appropriate wording such as ‘Please note:’ or ‘Important:’ to the start of your paragraph, and make this phrase bold, and then use a soft return to start the message on the next line. Adding this phrase means that screen readers will also recognise that the text is something that cannot be ignored. The phrases ‘Please note:’ or ‘Important:’ are already in use on some pages of the website so applying them consistently will strengthen the context.

It is acceptable to use bold to emphasise significant keywords within the important paragraph. Just don’t overuse it, and do not apply it to the whole paragraph. The less bold, the more effective the emphasis is.

Guidance

The CSS style called ‘Important’ webpage explains why we have the new formatting style, when to use it, and how to apply it.

The ‘Emphasis’ section of the LJMU online content style guide gives guidance about how the ‘Important’ style should be used and formatted.

As we continue to improve and move towards a more compliant website, we strongly recommend that you become familiar with our series of website guidance:

• LJMU online content style guide
• Making your content accessible guide
• Submitting a publishing request guidance
• LJMU brand guidelines

Thank you,

Web Content Team

Hi Web Content Community,

We contact you from time to time because you either write for the LJMU website, or publish parts of it, or do both. We also recognise that for a number of you, handling the website content may be an ‘extra’ to your role and it can be hard to understand why we would be asking for what may appear to be small or cosmetic changes.

Well, we wanted to share with you the impact that all of the small changes are having on our website 😊

We monitor our website on an index that compares our website’s accessibility to other UK universities.

In January this year, we were scoring 63 and ranked 124th in UK universities.

This month (May) we are scoring 82 and are now ranking 59th in UK universities.

Accessibility is measured in standards ranked as level A, level AA and level AAA. We have to meet the level AA standard to pass an audit, if we hit AAA standard then that is excellent! Our score includes an increase of nearly 30% in compatibility in each of the level AA and level AAA standards.

We only need to score around 6 more points to get into the index’s UK Universities leader board!

This achievement is a huge team effort between the ITS team, ourselves (the Web Content team), and you – our contributors. It is recognising the user at the heart of our work before we even start to put pen to paper, adapting to and following the guidance we provide, and even the smallest acts that make the difference.

All those unique page titles, clear and concise headings, thinking about the reading age, not using tables, using images appropriately and providing good metadata and summaries for the Search Engine is working for us; and is just as important as the coding behind the webpages.

So please keep considering how the user might use your content, keep following the guidance we provide, keep going back to the guidance because it is being updated all the time, and recognise that although it may be small and just one page – it really is making a difference.

You can find links to our guidance on the Brand and Design at LJMU page under the ‘Website publishing, digital accessibility and online content style guide’ heading. There are 3 guides:

• Submitting a website publishing request guide
• Making your content accessible guidance
• LJMU online content style guide

Thank you,
Web Content Team

Hi all,

As you know, the Web Content Team and the IT Services team are busy working to improve the accessibility and usability of the website.

One of the issues we are addressing, is to make sure that the headings on the pages are correctly marked up with the right styles. It sounds like a small detail, but incorrectly marked headings interrupt how a page is read by assistive technology, and this makes the page inaccessible. We are pledged to address this and other issues on our Accessibility Statement.

One of the recurring problems is that some paragraphs on webpages have used a heading3 (H3) style to make the paragraph’s content look larger and stand out. The most common occurrence is for introductory paragraphs.

To fix this problem we have developed a new font css style called ‘Large’ – this has the same look and feel in that the font appears larger, but it will read as normal text and doesn’t interrupt the correct order of the page structure.

We need our colleagues, who are SiteCore editors, to be aware of this new font style and to use it appropriately from this point forward. We also need these editors to update their existing live pages that have used heading styles in order to make the paragraph visually stand out.

If you are a Content Contributor (that is someone who writes for the web but doesn’t actually publish), you still need to be aware of the styles and standards that we have to use and meet in order to produce accessible content.

The New large font css style page explains why we have the new font, when to use it, and how to apply it.

The ‘Headings’ section of the LJMU online content style guide gives further guidance about how all page headings and sub-headings should be used and formatted.

As we continue to improve and move towards a more compliant website, we strongly recommend that you become familiar with our series of website guidance:

• LJMU online content style guide
• Making your content accessible guide
• Submitting a website publishing request guidance
• LJMU brand guidelines

Thank you,
Web Content Team

This email has been sent to known SiteCore editors and other contributors for the LJMU website. Please feel free to forward this to anyone in your community who provides website content and is not on this list, and let us know so that we can add them.

We will send out information to our Content Community from time to time, and we promise not to overuse this email distribution list.

The website guidance pages are continually updated – please keep referring to them.

Thank you.

Hi everyone,

We have updated some of our guidance in the:

• LJMU online content style guide
• Making your content accessible guide

In the LJMU online content style guide, we have updated and added guidance to help you write time and dates in various contexts. A consistent format for dates and times across the website creates a content pattern that the users can easily recognise, and this contributes to building trust and improves usability.
We have introduced clear guidance for writing:

• date ranges
• GMT
• Midnight
• 24hr clock

In the Making your content accessible guide, we have updated our guidance in the following sections:

• Readability
• Accessible documents and attachments
• Accessibility checkers - We have split the section about Accessibility Checkers in to separate sections for PDF, Microsoft and Canvas
• within the ‘Accessibility Checker – PDF’ we have provided a link to a free webinar that has useful tips for making a PDF accessible.

As we continue to improve the website, we will be updating our guidance pages, so please keep returning to the guides for tips and techniques that will help you write and create accessible content for your webpages.

Thank you,
Web Content Team

Hi to all our web authors and contributors,

SiteCore is the platform that we use to deliver the LJMU website, and we are upgrading it to improve the user experience.

The Web Content Team is currently assisting the IT Team by testing parts of the new SiteCore 10 upgrade.

As a result, we have limited resources for publishing which means our response times will be slower. We expect this period to last over the next couple of weeks.

Please note, during this period we will assess all publishing requests and deal with them as soon as we can. However, non-urgent and standard requests may not get dealt with as promptly as usual.

There may be a minimal number of business-critical exceptions to this rule. Please contact Geoff Scott or Tris Brown if you have a critical publishing request.

The testing does not affect the SiteCore 7 version that we are currently using.

We will keep you informed of any changes in our service.

We thank you for your co-operation,
Web Content Team

Hi all,

We contacted you last month to let you know that we are pulling together a stakeholder group of authors and website contributors. This is so that we can work with you to review the LJMU website and its usability and accessibility.

We plan to use this email group to contact everyone, to share knowledge and updates, and to collect feedback.

Thank you for taking part.

We have now updated and published the guidance for creating accessible content for the website.

Accessibility is something that everyone contributes to, and has a responsibility for, and even the smallest change makes a big difference.

Whilst the IT and Web Content teams are developing the website in the background, we all can play a part in making our content more accessible just by making the content easy to understand.

The guidance is found on the Brand and Design at LJMU page under the ‘Website publishing, digital accessibility and online content style guide’ heading.

There are 3 guides:

• Submitting a website publishing request guide
• Making your content accessible guidance
• LJMU online content style guide

We recommend that you make yourselves familiar with all three guides, and then dip in and out of them to select specific guidance as you write your content.

We are supporting this guidance with drop-in sessions that will discuss and demonstrate the standards. The first drop-in session is planned for 10am on 28 June, and we will be sending invites out soon.

Please do not hesitate to give us any feedback about these guides – we want them to make sense and be useful for you.

Thank you,
Web Content Team

Hi,

SiteCore is the platform that we use to deliver the LJMU website, and you may already be aware that it is being updated soon.

We are also looking at the website and its usability and accessibility.

As we start to make improvements we want to be able to involve all our content authors so that they are aware of changes, and to gather feedback.

The mailing list used for this email has been updated to include all the content authors and content providers that are known to the Web Content Team.

Please complete the LJMU website content contributors survey form to let us know if you still contribute to the LJMU website.

We will only remove people from this mailing list once they have confirmed that they are not content authors or content providers.

If you know someone that either provides content or is an author who has not received this email, please forward it on.

We expect the changes to the website to be a long-term and ongoing process, and we look forward to developing the site with you.

Thank you,
Web Content Team