User Experience & Accessibility

You’ve gotten familiar with Drupal 7 theming and are starting to feel comfortable with it, just in time for development to start shifting to Drupal 8. Or perhaps you’re new to Drupal theming and aren’t sure where to start. Either way, this session is for you! This workshop-style demonstration will focus on UI development from the ground up, discussing building a clean Drupal 8 theme / sub-theme. We will be going through:

Gone are the days of having one massive JavaScript or CSS file. In this session we'll explore using libraries to conditionally load assets and resolve dependencies.

We'll cover the following topics:

Drupal Commerce has never looked nicer out of the box than it does on Drupal 8 thanks to Belgrade, the project's new default store theme. Developing the theme and an attractive demo store proved challenging for two key reasons:

SimplyTest.me has been a long-standing tool that has served Drupal community members with  an easy-to-use tool for creating Drupal sandboxes. This session walks through how people use SimplyTest and shares the various features of SimplyTest and the current underlying technical architecture, including the distributed computing infrastructure, use of LXC, and the Drupal 7 based provisioning platform. Based on lessons learned and emerging technology, a roadmap has been created to both modernize and evolve SimplyTest.

For some, accessibility conjures nightmares of garish focus rings and high-contrast fonts. For others, it's snooze-inducing checklists ad nauseam. 

With the onerous checklists and guidelines and complicated wording, accessibility can seem like a chore that takes a beautiful design and makes it...less beautiful. But accessible web design really boils down to a few basic principles and when you have these as your first principles when starting a project, you can save your self, your team, and your clients hours of headaches around accessibility testing.

User personas are good tools, but they have limits. They take a narrow look at what a specific "person" is going to do on a website. Personas don't give us a bigger picture of what drives our users and why they do the actions in the first place.

A value proposition canvas is a different way to look at users. It identifies all the things that are high value to the users. Once we understand this about the users, we can take a look at our products and services to align them with our user needs.

Want to learn about GatsbyJS?  What it is and how it can help you and your team?

Is it a framework?  Is it a static site generator?  GatsbyJS is an exciting way of thinking about building sites for the modern web.  

I will cover some of the main benefits that you or your team could experience with Gatsby:

The session will be devided in 4 parts: 
 
Part 1: Getting specifications: an approach to bring a number of very smart people in a room and go away with a plan everyone agrees on. 
 
Specifications are always one of the hardest parts of any technical project. In the scientific world, where consensus is vital, one can find themselves in need of multiple approaches in order to please everyone. In this part I will use my experience building websites for the CERN Physics department as an example to provide some tools for extracting and freezing specifications.  

This spring, our team built a high performing, ultra fast search interface for a client Drupal site using React JS, Apache Solr, and the Drupal Search API module.

This project allowed the client to leverage some of the well-established benefits of decoupling Drupal's content from the presentation layer, while also avoiding many of the challenges that complete decoupling involves.

Insights you'll get from this talk:

Open Y is an initiative driven by YMCAs for YMCAs. It is an open source platform built on Drupal 8. It is a philosophy of sharing, collaboration, and innovation. It is a community of YMCAs and digital partners.