Our Initiatives

In addition to providing web support and design services to the Perelman School of Medicine, our team is involved in several ongoing initiatives:

Web Accessibility

DART and the University as a whole is committed to ensuring that there are no barriers preventing people with disabilities from interacting with our websites. The standard for Penn websites is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA, which includes a set of recommendations for making pages more accessible, both for people with disabilities and for users of mobile devices. Achieving this goal is important so that all individuals have the opportunity to consume information equitably.

Our team completed a thorough analysis of its websites and applications and made the coding changes required for compliance on virtually all of our sites. The only exception are the sites using the first iteration of our self-serve platform. If you have one of those sites, we encourage you to upgrade your site to SSFlex.

Now that the underlying code has been remediated, we need to work with MODX publishers to assess and fix issues related to web content such as the proper use of image ALT tags, readable PDFs, and descriptive link labels. We are planning to roll out a new rich-text editor called TinyMCE that will provide better accessibility alerts and guidance.

See the University's helpful guidelines and resources for more information on how you can make your site more accessible.

Video Streaming via MyMediasite

Our team, in partnership with Space Planning and Operations (SPO) Media and Technology Services, now provides video hosting via a product called MyMediasite. This service will make posting videos far easier and faster. We are currently working with SPO and the DART Sys Admin team to transition all of our current videos hosted on media.med.upenn.edu to this new platform.

Estimated date of completion: Fall 2023

New SSFlex Features

In our effort to continually improve our self-serve service, we have added several new features since its initial rollout, including:

An agenda feature for event-based websites
A new button group feature for subpages
The ability for publishers to create and embed their own PubMed feeds

Available now! Contact us for details.

SSFlex 2.0

We have begun planning for the next iteration of SSFlex. We are looking to include more modern themes, more features, more options for how your information can be displayed, and better accessibility guidance.

Estimated date of completion: 2024