Thursday, May 7, 2026

Here's a summary of features, fixes, and accessibility improvements delivered in April.

Features

  • Privacy notice banner — uiowa.edu now displays a notice linking to the University's privacy policy, replacing the retired OneTrust consent system.
  • SiteNow authentication performance — Improvements to how SiteNow authenticates with university data services reduce delays in the site provisioning and launching processes.
  • Hawk Alert cancellations — When Campus Safety cancels a Hawk Alert in Rave, the system will no longer trigger a new notification on the Emergency website. Alerts stop cleanly without additional noise.
  • Event prioritization for Registrar — On the Registrar's academic calendar, events tagged as "Five Year" (such as First Day of Classes) now appear first when multiple events share the same date.
  • Content usage analytics improvements — Editors can now see more accurate data about how content across their sites is being accessed.
  • Published Why image optimization matters for Iowa websites article.
  • Published Heading is not descriptive article.

Fixes

  • Updated Better Exposed Filters, making sure there were no regressions to the many implementations across SiteNow.
  • Updated Organic Groups, improving user access management on signage.sites.uiowa.edu.
  • Drupal core updated to 10.5.9.
  • Fixed a visual overflow issue with banner block elements.
  • Scoped a menu background color change to the correct navigation depth so it doesn't bleed into unintended menu levels.
  • Improved reliability of Hawk Alert fetching and error handling.

Accessibility

The federal government has extended the ADA Title II digital accessibility compliance deadline by one year, giving institutions additional time to meet WCAG 2.1 AA requirements. We're continuing our work regardless.

  • Brand Icons received a comprehensive accessibility overhaul: skip navigation link, keyboard-accessible modal with proper focus management and focus return, labeled search input, ARIA switch semantics for the color toggle, proper dialog roles, and decorative image handling throughout.
  • Updated UIDS' Storybook instance and addressed accessibility issues across form controls and table components.
  • Fixed accessibility issues with the ITS alert information icon.
  • Fixed pager and empty table state accessibility in the SiteNow content overview.
  • Fixed a hidden breadcrumb that lacked a visible focus indicator.
  • Addressed an accessibility concern with the Iowa Health Care logo in the brand bar.
  • Increased tap/click target size on Leaflet map buttons.

Code releases