Date:
21 October 2022
Author:
Phillipa Martin

Day 1

Day 1 saw the Salsa staff hit the conference rooms, starting with an enlightening keynote from Zaidul Alam, the current board director and national data lead of GovHack Australia Limited. He spoke about GovHack including its relationship with open source and some of the projects that have come out of the GovHack weekend hackathons.

Below are some key takeaways from some of the other day 1 sessions.

Managing a managed service: An exercise in automating the D8 to D9 upgrade for over 170 websites

By Alistair O’Neill & Yvonne Norris from GovCMS/the Department of Finance

This session reflected on the work automating the move for 170+ GovCMS websites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9. Lessons learnt will be fed into the next project, moving 280+ sites from D9 to D10. Key areas of improvement identified include:

  • Build earlier, build often
  • Automate more
  • Clarify scope
  • Targeted communication
  • Plan, plan…
  • Engage both up and down stream
  • Plan for the worst, aim for the best
  • Help customers help themselves

The challenges of designing a HCD component-based design system and Drupal 9 theme

By Akhil Bhandari

Not surprisingly there were a few Salsarians in Akhil’s session.

Key takeaways: CivicTheme is a design system (Figma) and Drupal 9 (and 10) theme. It was built to extend on the Australian Design System (AuDS). It solves the problems associated with building websites, such as:

  • High costs
  • Long project timelines
  • Lack of consistent UX that meets accessibility standards
  • Repeated patterns
  • Repetition of basic development (costs)
  • Lack of flexibility in ongoing management

The top 5 challenges were also presented:

  • Designing for the user
  • Make a meaningful improvement to the AuDS/GOLD
  • Fitting product development into a busy agency
  • Choosing a basic colour palette
  • You can’t be everything to everyone

Better user and editor experience - exploring open data on GovCMS

By Julia Topliss (Morpht) & Matthew Pirani (IPEA)

This project moved a 5 year old GovCMS PaaS site to the GovCMS SaaS platform. Key areas for project success were:

  • Revised IA and content model
  • Content more discoverable
  • Editors to manage content better
  • Data discoverability

Mobile accessibility: building accessible mobile sites and native apps

By Gian Wild, AccessibilityOz

This was a fascinating look at accessibility!

With WCAG 2.0 created in 2006 and big changes in mobile technology since then, there was a gap. WCAG 2.1 was supposed to address mobile, and while it does include guidelines that relate to touch screens it still doesn’t address everything. A global group of accessibility specialists got together and developed a new methodology to better cover accessibility for mobile sites and native apps.

The outcome for mobile was the Mobile Accessibility Guidelines, which were released in January 2020. The guidelines cover a five-step process. Gian also talked about five common traps that users with accessibility issues encounter.