Seattle Jobs Initiative
Snap to Skills: A Custom Drupal Website
Seattle Jobs Initiative is an organization that provides training to individuals seeking to develop their skills in a variety of industries. Because of the success of its organization, Seattle Jobs Initiative received a federal grant that allowed it to develop an additional program for the USDA, SNAP to Skills. Much like their original efforts, SNAP to Skills assists schools and workforce retraining programs with resources and information on successful programs.
The SNAP to Skills website would need to be able to communicate the same program structure, resources, and requirements outside of the Seattle area, sharing information with those seeking to participate. In order to create a website powerful enough to handle that level of content management, Seattle Jobs Initiative decided they would build their website with a Drupal CMS.
Building a Drupal CMS: Customized for Complete Accessibility
After meeting with Seattle Jobs Initiative and reviewing their goals for their project, we decided to build their new website with the latest release of Drupal, Drupal 8. We began work in February, constructing a website that could be completely manageable as a publishing tool, and easily navigable for their users.
A key requirement for the SNAP to Skills website was that it was 508 compliant. The Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 stipulates that any federally funded website must meet accessibility standards. For a website to be compliant, it has to support any assistive technology. In order to ensure the the website was compliant, we tested it with assistive technology ourselves. We also used the Google Chrome extension ARIA Validator, combing through the website looking for any issues.
Developing a Front-End Design
We created the SNAP to Skills web design and interaction design, emphasizing simple navigation for easy access to information.
