News

2025

Affiliate Site Colour-Scheme Issues (Remediation Work in Progress)

Affiliate websites are those that are hosted by this University but not wholly run by the university - typically,  multi-institutional research groups would fall into this category.  These websites are allowed to use their own colour scheme and publish their own logo, alongside the University's one - while at the same time, taking advantage of the University CMS, and all its content types, for quick and easy website development.

We noticed, very early in the year, that a delayed reaction had begun affecting affiliate websites, where the University brand colours were now overriding certain aspects of their colour schemes, and hiding their logo.  The colour changes were introducing accessibility issues, in some cases, where the the correct text colour was now appearing on an incorrect background colour.  The resulting inadequate contrast adversely affected the legibility of the website text.

The mechanism that powers affiliate sites was upgraded to counteract the problems caused by the way the University's designers chose to apply our brand colours; however, a website conversion process is necessary to apply this change.  This has been automated inasmuch as possible.  We are now working our way through each affiliate site, converting them to the latest affiliate template, to restore their correct look and feel.

To date, the issue has been resolved for the Abbey Theatre Minute Books, BioInnovate, Blood Cancers, CEGS, and Shannon College affiliate websites. 

The following websites have yet to be reviewed to see whether remediation is necessary: Acadamh, CDLP, CFRC, CHARMS, ILAS, Stem Cells, International Summer School, Moore Istitute (Draft), Leabharlann, ROCSAFE, Corrib Core Lab, Open Repositories, and Tomas O'Maille. 

This work is progressing as quickly as practicable but is being slowed by many other demands on the ISS web team.  Please bear with us as we make our way through this large task.

Twitter Icon

The Twitter icon, that appears in the footer of most websites, has been replaced with an X icon to reflect the renaming of that social media platform.
[Feb 16]

Course Module Information Glitches 

In January, course modules were affected by 2 distinct issues.

First, Google Analytics (GA), required by M&C, suddenly began breaking the module information pages for some users - and this only happened to those users who had given it permission to work without needing to modify the website content.  We were unable to discover who was responsible for this obvious mis-configuration of the analytics tool, which is not managed or supported by ISS, so we took the only remaining option available to us - we modified our module viewer to make it GA-proof. 
[This issue was resolved by Jan 14]

Second, courses with subjects defined (e.g. Arts) had become very difficult to understand for web visitors because the auto-inserted headlines, outlining the subject name and prerequisites for that subject had stopped displaying.  This meant that a confusing list of optional and required modules (which added up to far more than 60 credits) was displayed for each year.

This issue greatly reduced the usefulness of the course module lists for some of our most popular courses - a feature that is very useful to prospective and current students, alike (See an example - this list appears in the 'BA Arts' course page).  Unfortunately, this usability issue had begun happening at least a year before it was reported but it was only brought to our attention in the first week of February. 
[The issue was resolved fully by February 14]

2024

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumb trails were not rendering correctly on some pages. The word 'Home' was appearing instead of the home icon and an empty item was showing.  E.g.

HOME >  > INFORMATION SOLUTIONS AND SERVICES > ABOUT US

Both issues were resolved in mid-October.

Accessibility Toolbar

On August 15, we rolled out the Recite Me toolbar to all www.universityofgalway.ie pages.  This tool will read text aloud on any page, and can also translate the site content to multiple languages.  This translated content can also be read aloud.  Recite Me offers tools which can be useful to anyone with conditions that adversely affect reading, such as dyslexia, ADHD, and many different visual impairments. 

This new feature makes the University Website far more accessible to the entire world by:

• Making it easier for anyone who does not have English as their first language.
• Assisting the 14% of people, worldwide, who benefit from assistive technology.

The 'Accessibility & Languages' link, which launches this toolbar, appears on the utility menu (the very top line of the website).  It replaces the previous accessibility link, which contained outdated 'larger text size' and 'high-contrast' options - things that are now built into our website design as standard.  On mobile devices, you will find the 'Accessibility & Languages' link by clicking the menu button on the top-right and scrolling down to the QUICKLINKS.

We have a licence to use this toolbar on our main domain name only (www.universityofgalway.ie), which is why you will not see the link when you preview a page on the CMS but it will show when you visit the published page.

Courses: Module List Modifications

The middleware that generates course module lists was modified in mid-July to:

• Exclude hidden (e.g. Erasmus) and Repeat-only modules
• Comply fully with accessibility guidelines.
• Work around security modifications in latest version of Apache, which affected its functionality.

Courses: List Additional Modules

For reasons unknown to the web team, some courses were entered into the University's Curriculum Manager using 2 separate course codes. For example, instead of defining all 4 years' modules for the course BO, 2 distinct courses were added to Akari - the first (named BO1) defining years 1 and 2's modules, and the second (named BO2) defining years 3 and 4's details.

The 'Course Template 1' content type was modified, in mid-June, to handle this scenario. It now has an optional 'Internal Course Code 2' field.  By adding a valid course code to 'Internal Course Code 2', that course's modules will be seamlessly added to the existing module list, which is generated by the 'Internal Course Code' field.
Note: These module lists are not visible in T4's Preview - they only appear on the published course page.

For the majority of courses, this 2nd field can be left blank.

Accessibility: Image ALT text

In mid-May 2024, The 'Description' field, in the media library was made mandatory for all users.  This field is necessary for the image's alt text - the description that explains the image to people with visual impairments.  

If you add a new image (or edit an existing image) in the media library, you will have to fill the description in before you can save your change. 

E.g.: For the above image, the description could be 'Two students, in a busy outdoor area, on-campus, wearing colourful NUI Galway-branded backpacks; one maroon, the other yellow'.
You can use up to 400 characters in the description which should be more than enough for all needs.
Tip: If in doubt, select the description and use ISS's useful bookmarklet #6 to quickly count the characters.

If you add a new document to the media library, you will also need to supply a description before you can save it (e.g. 'Instruction Document').  This will not be used but this is a small price to pay to ensure the accessibility of images, into the future.

Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation

In late April 2024, 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 2024, 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.

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.