Digital Communications team update – October 2022
Latest updates from the Digital Communications team for October 2022.
Did I miss the September newsletter?
Nope! We forgot to send out a newsletter for September, but we’ll catch you up with anything you may have missed in this newsletter.
PDF accessibility
The University website has over 5,000 PDF files, most of which do not comply with accessibility legislation. If documents do not meet accessibility standards they could be breaking the Equality Act 2010.
Over the next couple of months, the team will be working on improving the accessibility of the most popular PDF files.
You can help us by reading our advice on how to improve the accessibility of PDF files.
Meaningful links
Studies show that most users inevitably skim web pages for links and headings, so your link titles should be punchy, clear and have specific calls to action, even out of context. It is also a legal requirement to ensure links comply with accessibility guidelines.
Find out how to avoid uninformative link phrases.
Friendly filenames
Many files uploaded to T4 are not following the University’s filename standards.
File names that include capital letters, special characters and spaces are not suitable for the internet as they are converted into an unfriendly format for the user.
We are encouraging all users of T4 to remind themselves of the policy, we have also summarised the policy in our ‘How to write a friendly filename’ blog post.
Vimeo channel to shut down on 30 June 2023
The University’s Vimeo channel has been unsupported since 2019 with YouTube now being used as our main video channel.
The team will do a partial archive of significant videos by migrating them to our YouTube channel.
Then on Friday 30 June 2023, the Vimeo channel will be shut down with all videos and content on the platform being permanently deleted.
If you have any videos on the University of St Andrews Vimeo channel that you would like preserved, please contact [email protected].
More information about the archiving process is available on our blog.
Biology and Medicine multisite migration
Over the past year, we have been responsible for migrating the Synergy and Medicine WordPress multisites (hosted by Biology and Medicine respectively) over to our WordPress host, WPEngine.
This project is now completed having migrated a total of 82 sites (47 from the Synergy server and 35 from the old Medicine server).
Retirement of the old long form page styling
The old long form page styles have been retired due to accessibility issues.
First introduced in 2015, the long form patterns were becoming cumbersome to maintain and it was decided the best solution was to replace the long form style pages with more accessible content types.
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