Web Council - September 25, 2014

Announcements
- Next meeting October 16
- UW Brand
  - UW Brand website available http://www.washington.edu/brand/
  - Watch the Marketing and Communications blog for news http://www.washington.edu/marketing/blog/
  - Every two weeks through the Fall, meetings will be held to share new elements and templates as they come online.
Brand update
- Mindy Messenger (mlm3@uw.edu) and Dane Odekirk (dizzzy@uw.edu)
  - Beta homepage will soon be viewable
    - Simple header, audience based
    - New search with auto-suggest
    - Main menu can be configured your way
    - Quick Links slide from the right side
    - Popular links no longer at bottom, some will be in page as icons
      - People were not using the link-farm links.
    - Fast facts at the bottom
    - Next week will have a link to the beta so you can go there and kick the tires
  - As work progresses, announcements will be made on the Marketing blog http://www.washington.edu/marketing/blog/
  - Tools to help you do the same thing
    - Boundless Brand portal now available at uw.edu/brand
    - Still loading assets
  - New WordPress template being finalized
    - Already in use on Brand site, homepage, and Faculty site (uw.edu/faculty)
    - Available at github.com/uweb/uw-2014
    - A Drupal version is in the works
    - A library of header images will be provided
    - Theme is fully responsive, works on everything from smartphones to desktops
  - Aspirationally, we are trying to get consistency across UW sites
Google & SSL
- Don Devange, founder/principal of DSquared-Media since 2011, Don@dsquared-media.com
- SEO implications of encryption
  - Approach from an SEO discovery perspective; will your content still be found, discovered, and used
  - Google rarely identifies ranking signals; they do not say how they decide what is more important in ranking
    - In 2010 did say they use site speed
    - Last month, announced that https will be used as a ranking signal; what to prevent and fix security breaches
      - Motivated by Heartbleed malware
      - Https is considered, at the moment, a lightweight signal for ranking
      - But over time its importance will be increased in ranking to try to push people to more security
  - If switching to https...
    - Encryption happens at the subdomain level; many settings are needed
    - Google sees web domains as separate websites
      - A separate robots.txt will be needed for each subdomain
      - A sitemap file is good
    - Review all URLs and make a keep/kill list
      - Migrated content should redirect to new version
    - Canonicalization & analytics
      - link tag in each page declaring that this page is the canonical one, in case other copies of the page exist
    - Robots.txt
      - Says what is acceptable to index in a search
    - Redirects
      - Don't forget to reset all the redirects so they go to the https version
  - What needs to happen now
    - Right now, nothing!
    - Still a weak signal in search engine optimiation (SEO)
    - Focus on high quality content, using links, navigation; making sure people can use the content
  - Discussion
    - If using Open SSL, make sure you have done the updates that deal with HeartBleed
PDF accessibility
- Terrill Thompson (tft@uw.edu)
- Quick look at beta.homepage; Terrill and Dan Comden are working with the UW Web team to help make sure it is accessible
- PDF accessibility
  - A lot of content out there on UW sites is in PDF files
  - Features for accessible documents
    - Alt text for images
    - Good structure with headings, lists
    - Document language declared (en, es, fr)
    - Accessible markup in forms
    - Accessible markup in tables
    - Accessibility is not automatic; authors need to learn how to use these features
  - Types of PDFs
    - Images - least accessible; may be able to extract words with OCR but often does not make sense
    - Image with embedded fonts - may or may not be intelligible
    - Tagged (optimized for accessibility)
  - To Create an Accessible PDF
    - Use an authoring tool that supports
      - the features of accessible documents
      - exports to an accessible tagged PDF.
        Mac Word does not produce properly tagged PDFs.
        Windows Word does (if you use Save As) and if you have Tagged checked in the preferences. If you use Print to PDF the accessibility features are lost.
        InDesign can make accessible PDFs, but only if you following a specific workflow
  - PDFs at the UW
    - We are working with vendors to find a service for fixing PDFs that could be made available to the UW
    - One vendor scanned 300 UW PDFs
      - 28% were properly tagged
      - 11% had image, but only one had alt text
      - 18% had data tables but none had table headers
      - 3% had form fields, but only three had tooltips to help interpret the form
    - Disability Resource office keeps tally on the work they do with PDFs
      - Winter 2014
        806 PDFs process for students with disabilities
        21.6% required conversion to readable text
        81.9% had no tags
    - HTML is a better format for delivering accessible content, and easier to make accessible
      - PDFs are good for when you want to have specific, rigid format, but harder to make accessible
    - Adobe Acrobat Pro can be used to improve the accessibility of a PDF
      - Has an accessibility tool - View->Tools->Accessibility
      - Can do OCR on images to extract text, but results needs to be reviewed
      - Can review and edit tags
      - Can change the read order of elements in the document
      - Can view and edit the tagged structure
    - Exploring other options for remediating PDFs
      - SensusAccess; online document conversion service
        Converts PDF documents to a variety of formats
        Does not do a great job, but it can generate a readable document that has some tagging
        tinyurl.com/uw-doc-convert
        Anybody with a UW NetID can go to the site
        Does not create good, tagged PDF
      - CommonLook Global PDF
        Improved user interface for retrofitting PDFs
        If interested in participating in the free trial, contact Terrill at tft@uw.edu
Mobile Minute
- How we use our cell phones?
  - We need to know who is using our content as we build our websites
  - 90% of Americans have a cell phone
  - 67% check their phones frequently
Amazon Services UW Web Team case study
- Dane Odekirk (dizzzy@uw.edu)
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now being used by the UW Web Team
  - Provides a lot of tools for hosting
  - Pay service
  - Using the Amazon Linux AMI sever
- Currently using
  - EC2 - Elastic Cloud server
    - Can easily launch an instance (server)
    - Also have Volume (harddrive)
  - Elastic IPs
    - Every time you launch a new server, you get a news public IP number
    - Each time you add computers, you get a new number
    - Can point to a single IP address, dedicated to you, never changes
  - Monitoring; a realtime analysis of what is going on
    - Notifications can be set up to send email if things happen
- AWS also offers Relational Database Server; for databases only
  - Much like EC2
  - Also has monitoring
  - Detailed interface and an app
  - Can be configured to do automatic backups
  - If seeing a spike, can Create Read Replica to duplicate your database; pay for it, but you can turn it off when you no longer need it
- Discussion
  - Does UW have an agreement with Amazon? No.
  - Managing access; you can create security groups. They are strange, but you can figure them out
  - Can choose where your data is; can also choose to have multi-zone configuration to address geographical redundancy for major emergencies
  - Prices? UW Web Team sites are hosted for about $350 a month.
    - Price for servers is by the hour
    - Bandwidth is expensive for Amazon; beneficial to have all the pieces on AWS
    - Takes care of a lot of worries; backup, auto-upgrades, etc.

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