February Web Professionals meeting: PDFebruary at Carolina with Craig Haywood
We all know PDFs are problematic, but it can be daunting to tackle a mountain of inaccessible PDF content on your website. PDFebruary to the rescue!
Join Carolina Web Professionals and the Digital Accessibility Office for PDFebruary as we declare February a month of making websites more inclusive by eliminating inaccessible portable document format (PDF) files.
At our next Web Professionals meeting on February 6 at 2:00pm, join us and special guest speaker Craig Haywood who will introduce the PDFebruary challenges, share resources and answer your questions about how to reduce PDFs on your website. You don’t need to participate in the PDFebruary challenges to attend the Web Pros meeting, but we encourage you to register and participate in both. During PDFebruary, each week will have a dedicated theme to guide participants through eliminating inaccessible PDFs on their websites.
Register for PDFebruary now through January 30 by completing the PDFebruary registration form!
This will be a hybrid meeting. Anyone is welcome to join us in person at the Graduate Student Center at 211A West Cameron Ave. For those who wish to attend remotely, the Zoom information has been shared with the group.
Our first 2021 meeting will be next Thursday, July 15th, at 2pm and our speaker will be Gary Wilhelm, Digital Solutions Manager for the Division of Finance and Operations. Gary will be talking about a topic that can generate a lot of strong feelings in those of us who manage websites: PDF documents!
See below for more details on Gary and on the topics he will be discussing.
Presentation summary:
A major component of many university websites, in addition to elements such as text, images, and videos, are PDF documents. PDFs can be both a blessing and a curse when it comes down to conveying information to our audiences, and one of the many challenges that web designers face is the best way to use and integrate them into their websites. In this presentation, Gary Wilhelm will explore the PDF, discuss the best times when and when not to use it, and show several ways in which he has successfully integrated both simple and complex PDFs into websites for Finance and Operations as well as Institutional Integrity and Risk Management. In addition, he will spend some time discussing PDF accessibility and demonstrate tips and tricks for making your PDFs ADA-compliant.
Speaker details:
Gary Wilhelm is the Digital Solutions Manager for the Division of Finance and Operations at UNC-Chapel Hill, which is a fancy way of saying that he works on websites and develops web applications. He has been employed at the University for almost 22 years and has worked in several departments during that time, spending nine years at the law school before his current tenure of about 5.5 years with Finance and Operations. He holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from UNC-Chapel Hill. In his spare time, he likes to travel, do yard work, run, watch sports, pester his wife and two teenagers, and help his dog look for squirrels and rabbits.