News

2024

IRIS Profiles - Discipline Imports

The 'Staff from IRIS Discipline' content type quietly stopped importing researcher profiles in mid-April this year.  This was thankfully brought to the web team's attention by both the School of Business and Economics and the IRIS system administrator. 

Initial investigations suggested a change to T4's web object's behaviour.  This is used to read researcher profiles into the CMS, for publication on the University website.  
However, T4 was unaware of any issues with (or changes to) the web object that could explain this issue. 

Following exhaustive black-box testing, the ISS web team deduced that a security update to another component of the T4 platform, or its hosting environment, had the unexpected knock-on effect of disabling the web object's ability to handle relative links.  After proving the efficacy of a work-around, we then modified our IRIS middleware to circumvent this newly emerged constraint to T4's website scraper, to resolve the issue, site-wide.

Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

In April, this year, the web team introduced additional features to the website to further improve its accessibility for users who navigate using the keyboard.

On all browsers, pressing the 'Tab' key will jump you to the next interactive item on the page (i.e. links).  The University website now has a hidden two link bar that will only appear when the 'Tab' key is used. This allows the user to jump past all the menu links, at the top of the page, to quickly gain access to the main content.  If the webpage includes a side navigation bar, the link bar will also contain a 2nd link, to jump directly to it.

By introducing this feature, the University joins with many other progressive websites (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft) in offering this time-saving courtesy to anyone that; due to illness, injury, or personal preference; uses the keyboard rather than a mouse.

Accessibility: Accordion Content Type

In April, the web team also discovered that one of our most popular content types, the Accordion (used on this webpage), was inaccessible to anyone relying solely on the keyboard to navigate.  Our original designers had inadvertently created a content type that only worked with a mouse!  This inequality was immediately addressed - Accordions are now focusable when you press the 'Tab' key and can be opened/closed by pressing the <Enter> / <Return> key - just like any other clickable link.

Test it out
Feel free to test this new feature out by pressing Shift-Tab to select the previous Accordion item and then pressing <Enter> to close/open it.
(Note: Tab skips you to the next focusable element on the page, whereas Shift-Tab goes to the previous one).
If the accordions are not accessible to you, via the keyboard, your browser has not yet read the newest version of our site's JavaScript (browsers tend to read this only once in a while, to speed up your page loads).  In this case, simply use Ctrl-F5 (or else Ctrl-Shift-R) to tell your browser to reload the page without cutting any corners.