Best Practices for Posting to the RIT Events Calendar
All RIT faculty and staff have the ability to submit events to the RIT Events calendar. Those events are then reviewed and published by their college's or division's event stewards.
In order to help ensure event postings are consistent and easy to understand for all users, event submitters and stewards should review the following best practices. These best practices include accessibility standards to support RIT's commitment to making web content more accessible to people with disabilities.
Images
Size and specs
The main image should be 1080 x 720 pixels. There is a 2MB limit, and accepted file types are PNG, GIF, JPG, and JPEG. The filename should not have any spaces or punctuation, except dashes and underscores.
Alt tags
Images must contain useful alt text, in order to describe the image for people who use screen readers. Alt text should be concise and descriptive.
Good alt text
alt="College student wearing chef coat handing out a paper grocery bag."
Bad alt text
alt="Student"
alt="photo"
alt=""
Images containing text
It is best practice to avoid using images that contain text, unless it is a logo. If an image contains text, the entire text must be written out in the image alt text or in the event description.
QR codes
Use caution when repurposing images from printed media, such as posters or table tents. These pieces often contain QR codes, which do not serve a purpose for users already viewing event information on a computer or mobile device.
Links
Meaningful
Link text should never be just 'read more' or 'learn more', because this is not helpful to a screen reader, and can be confusing if multiple links have the same text. All link text should be unique on a page, and should be descriptive of what the user is selecting.
Correct
Incorrect
Descriptive
Link text should not be URLs. Instead, be descriptive of the link.
Correct
Learn more on the Admissions website.
Incorrect
Learn more at https://www.rit.edu/admissions
Event Description
The Event Description field is set by default to “Filtered HTML” text format. This format allows adding bold, italics, bullets, and links, but prevents extraneous formatting from other applications. Changing the text format to “Full HTML” allows for more styles, but you must remove existing formatting if pasting text from another application, such as Microsoft Word. After pasting the text, select all and click the Tx button in the toolbar to remove formatting.