Department of Premier and Cabinet websites

I have been employed as a Digital Services Officer at the Tasmanian Department of Premier and Cabinet since June 2022. Since my commencement I have worked on a number of site review and remediation projects. These sites are all housed in the Squiz Matrix content management system.

Jobs Tasmania website remediation

In 2022 there was a project to add a Disability Employment Portal to the Jobs Tasmania website. In conjunction with that project, I was asked to perform an accessibility audit of the whole Jobs Tasmania website. As a result of that audit, I was then required to implement the necessary changes to bring the site up to standard, where possible. The site is housed in Squiz Matrix, but a great proportion of the functionality comes from PageUp. This meant I needed to update the site's template in Matrix, but also the various job listing templates controlling the pages powered by PageUp. I was provided with access to the staging platform and the necessary templates by the vendor.

Most of the changes were 'under the hood', to improve the semantic structure. For example, I replaced the table layout for each job listing with a combination of headings and divs, made to still look like a table using CSS. I ensured buttons were marked up as such, and that all form fields were correctly labelled. Visual changes were only made if they were required for the accessiblity remediation - for example, colour contrast adjustments, increased line height and/or text size for legibility, and the use of a web font rather than a system font. The site's navigation was completely replaced as the existing one was entirely based on mouse hover. The new navigation menu can be entirely controlled with a keyboard, if that's what the user requires. I also rebuilt the site's header so that the background is comprised of a combination of two images and a colour, rather than a single image. This allows it to be much more responsive.

Before: The top of the 'Browse open jobs' page prior to the remediation. If you were to look at the code, you would see an HTML table layout for each listed job.

After: The top of the 'Browse open jobs' after the remediation. — After: The top of the 'Browse open jobs' page after the remediation. With a different font and altered line height and text size settings, everything has a little more space. The jobs still display in a table layout, but this is achieved with headings and divs styled to look like a table, rather than the HTML table element.

All changes were made in close collaboration with the site's business owners, especially the staff working specifically on the Disability Employment Portal, and they appreciated all of the improvements made. The remediated site was launched in December 2022.

https://www.jobs.tas.gov.au/

Technologies used

HTML5, CSS, Squiz Matrix CMS, PageUp, Jira.