Page Themes:
While SchoolMessenger includes any page themes in the Presence product that could be used for individual pages, we should not use any of these themes other than the default themes created for the OCPS websites. Why? Here are a few reasons.
- We want to provide consistency/continuity between all site pages (district and school) because the default page layouts define the OCPS theme. Remember, we are one OCPS family.
- The OCPS theme, while not perfect, has been refined over time to meet all the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) requirements for an accessible website. We know that some of the other themes have not been redesigned to meet ADA requirements and the use of them could put your site, school, or district into jeopardy with the Office of Civil Rights under the Department of Education in Washington DC.
- If other themes are used, other editors that may follow you could have problems editing the content because of differences in the page layouts.
- Other page themes will not use your school colors or the district colors. Some of the colors may even violate ADA color contrast requirements which until recently was not often evaluated by web page designers who had no color vision issues.
- Differences in default fonts found in themes (font face, font style, etc.) make the page look as if several different people worked on the page/site without talking to each other or even looking at what the existing pages looked like.
Bottom line: We are all part of ONE TEAM, the OCPS TEAM, and our websites and pages should reflect that. If the administration team discovers pages with other page themes, they will take action to revert them back to the default OCPS standard. The same applies to the school site’s home pages.
Closed Captioning vs. Audio Description:
Closed captioning on videos is nothing new. In fact, it has been around for years on many TV programs. Its purpose to help those with hearing impairments to understand what is going on in the program. This includes not only spoken words, but also references to sounds such as: <applause>, <wind>, <thunder>, <clapping>, and even just <music>. This need to help those with hearing impairments to understand what is going on in a video extends to videos as well. Imagine trying to watch a presentation by your child’s teacher without being able to hear the sound.
Therefore, the ability to add closed captioning has been made available by many video streaming services including YouTube. However, you must still tell YouTube to generate the text using Voice-to-Text technology. This generates a text file that is synced with the video to help those with hearing impairments. Unfortunately, the voice-to-text technology is not perfect and sometimes words are skipped or even similar sounds to the words that were spoken. The rate of speech as well as any accents can greatly affect the accuracy of the resulting text file. Never simply rely on the generated text without first checking it. Most systems, including both YouTube and Microsoft’s Stream, allow you to ‘tweak’ the generated text to correct errors. Failure to check the generated text may result in some embarrassing transcriptions.
Closed Captioning is useful not only for spoken words but also for text displayed on the screen. Take for example a video of a PowerPoint presentation. If the text from each slide Is not read aloud to the viewer, a vision-impaired view may miss this content entirely. Again, closed captioning can help, not because the visitor to the site can read the closed captioning, but because they may have the ability to hear the text from the closed captioning file.
And speaking of blind guests to your site, remember that they cannot see any action that occurs on the screen. This is where the more recent requirement for AD (Audio Description) comes into play. An AD file is like a CC file in that it is generally text-based but describes the action in the video. instead of including the spoken word, it displays text describing what is occurring on the screen. Unlike CC files which many platforms can generate automatically for you, the AD cannot currently be automatically generated. However, Audio Description can be displayed as Closed Caption text on the screen as well as voice-over on the video. An example can be seen in the CC track of this video: https://youtu.be/7-XOHN2BWG4. But this video does not have a voice from the characters.
Here is one that includes both closed captioning for voice and audio description for the action. It also shows that the text on the screen must be read.
Finally, watch the following video to see how smoothly Audio Description can be integrated with Closed Captioning from someone speaking. It is almost impossible to tell where pure CC transitions to AC because they are both part of the single CC track.
Recent News
Recent News should always appear in the left column of the school home page. Furthermore, it should always use the News Content page type and be built following the instructions found in the following document:
https://intranet.ocps.net/cms/One.aspx?portalId=125187&pageId=492786#
Furthermore, not everything is truly recent news. Displaying school hours, unless there has been a recent, sudden change is not recent news but appears in School Information. Displaying links for social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram are not necessary as these can be added to the header and footer of every page of your school site buy sending me the URL of your social media sites. Other items may also be more appropriate under one or more of the main menu dropdown menus. Recent News is for something ‘new’ that is happening at your school, not just links to standard information that can and perhaps does appear elsewhere.
Obsolete Content Pages
Do you have obsolete content pages? Perhaps they are sports calendars, meeting announcements, report card dates, etc. from prior years. Perhaps they are content pages from earlier this year, last year, or even older? Those pages should be archived if there is no new information to replace the old information. Deleting the contents of a page leaving a blank page leaves a visitor to your site wondering what is missing and for the vision impaired, they may wonder if anything (like an image) but which they cannot see.