Our Work

Services Provided

This project involved:

• Navigating a very tricky upgrade from EE 1.x to EE 2.x, including rewriting several critical add-ons in 2.x
• Creating some great animations, like the home page slide show, the relate stories box and my personal favorite, the login link—you must click the login link
• Replacing the popup subscribe ad with an in-page, fully functionality expanding subscription promotion
• Completely overhauling the way the articles and images are entered so that production can happen far more quickly, more error-free, and with better tools to re-use the content in multiple formats
• Creating cool new content types, like book reviews, point/counterpoint blog pages, and more—in addition to removing content types that didn’t make sense any more
• Overhauling site search to be more powerful and better integrated with the site design
• Integrating with social tools like Facebook and Twitter—and Google Plus, if that matters 😊
• Oh, and migrating from one server to a faster two-server setup for only a slight hosting cost increase, can’t forget that

In the fall of 2021, we did an accessibility audit for SSIR. Then we tackled the issues that impacted site visitors most critically. One of the most notable improvements was to the site’s Search button, which did not have correct text labeling in the code. That meant screen readers could not discern it was a “search button”, a significant problem for visitors with visual impairments. Given the crucial nature of a search button to a site’s overall usability and functionality, it is imperative that this element always be coded accessibly. Hop Studios updated the code and ARIA-label attributes so now this key tool is accessible to all site visitors.

Some additional accessibility fixes we made for SSIR include:

• Enabling zooming and scaling
• Ensuring every form element has a label in the comment form text input field
• Any keyboard operable user interface has a mode of operation where the keyboard focus indicator is visible
• Ensuring the contrast between foreground and background colours meets WCAG 2 AA contrast ratio thresholds
• Updating all links to have discernible text
• Updating all id attribute values of active elements is unique
• Providing programmatic (in addition to visual) indication that a form field is mandatory
• Ensuring all page content is contained by landmarks