Hi there,

Both Students with Disabilities and Veterans have unique circumstances, experiences, skills, and considerations that they bring with them into their career search process. The advice and support they need is nuanced, and we’ve heard firsthand from many of our university partners how challenging it can be to make sure they get the consistent and tailored support they need, on top of all the other work you’re doing in the career center. No one knows this challenge (and how to solve it) better than our partners at AbilityLinks, which is why we’re so excited to announce our new partnership!

Our partnership with AbilityLinks supports both Veterans and Students with Disabilities by integrating intentional and curated advice, resources, job postings, and more!

A bit more about AbilityLinks

AbilityLinks is a nationwide 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with disabilities and Veterans by connecting them to inclusive and diverse employment opportunities. Their online job board serves as a bridge between talented job seekers and employers who are actively working to create inclusive work environments.

Signing up is completely free and job seekers can receive free job consultation services at any time!

Check out our Veterans Kit and Students with Disabilities Kit to see AbilityLinks content in action!

Learn more about Curation Kits →

Hi there,

Creating or promoting a sponsorship program can help you to get the valuable employer funding needed to accelerate your team's work. And now, we're excited to announce our brand-new sponsorship templates - designed to help you take your office to that next level.

The template is already waiting for you to make finding sponsors easier than ever. You can preview, customize, publish and add it to your menu all in a matter of minutes!

Hi there,

We're excited to announce that our 10th Curation Kit is now live and ready to help you support your Latino and Hispanic students, straight from your dashboard!

What's included

Create a vibrant and supportive community for your Latino and Hispanic students by leveraging content from our incredible partners like Jopwell, #WeAllGrow Latina, Working Nation, and more. All our partners are dedicated to elevating the professional success of Latino and Hispanic job seekers, through the implementation of diversity-led recruitment strategies, facilitation of inclusive community engagement, and development of unique resources designed to help navigate the job market.

With at least 6 pieces of fresh, engaging content every month, you can rest assured that your students will have access to valuable advice, resources, and opportunities tailored just for them. And the best part? You won’t need to worry about a thing—we’ve got it all covered for you with our automated workflow options!

Want to learn more?

Check out our Curation Kit product page and raise your hand to speak to a member of the uConnect team directly!
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Accessibility is critical to our mission at uConnect. As a result, we’ve been making ongoing updates to ensure that the Virtual Career Center provides the most comprehensive accessibility options possible, and that our clients are equipped with best practices for building accessibility into their strategies. We’re excited to announce accessibility updates and best practices for the following VCC elements:

Hero Banners

The landing page is every virtual career center's "front door." It's a great opportunity for visual impact, but the carousel in this area was a common issue in accessibility reports.

During the recent WCAG 2.1 AA upgrade, we did significant research on carousels. We discovered that in many cases, carousels were both inaccessible and ineffective. Should I use a carousel? provides a great overview of these issues, including how statistics from one school (not a uConnect platform) revealed that "1% clicked a feature. Of those, 89% were on the item in the first position.” That’s just 1% of clicks for the most significant object on the home page!

We then reviewed our uConnect clients' sites and identified some additional common problems, such as text-heavy images without alt text making the content invisible to screen readers, and "carousel dots" (the navigation between slides) overlapping with content on mobile devices when clients had optimized their banners for desktop instead.

To solve for these and other issues, we’ve turned off the carousel functionality and use a single banner instead for all new VCC instances, which is better optimized for accessibility and the mobile experience. We also added a few thoughtful styles to make added-text content more readable on mobile.

For existing sites, we didn't want to suddenly remove functionality that our clients were already using. Multi-banner carousels can still be used, but we added an in-app warning about the accessibility considerations when clients edit their banners. Being able to recognize and address a potential problem spot like this instead of waiting on an accessibility report is a huge win for our clients, and being warned rather than suddenly blocked means that clients can adjust their content strategy on their own timelines.

Safely Respecting Client Branding

Another area of focus for our Accessibility work was color. As we worked on correcting color contrast issues throughout the platform, we identified several places where text colors were hard-coded, forcing the text to be a certain color (usually black or gray) that may not be in the client's brand palette.

Some of these were easy to swap to the client's default or heading text colors, but we also saw an opportunity to give clients the ability to make their branding consistent in more areas of their VCC. We used "color math" to dynamically generate muted colors that meet contrast guidelines while still matching the clients' main brand colors.

Client customizations typically include a dark-colored button with white text, but we saw that some clients were using "ghost buttons", an outline-style variant with a border, white or transparent background, and darker text. Some areas in our theme used the button background color as an accent, which was safe in most cases – but for those using the "ghost button,” some content was made invisible rather than attention-grabbing. We updated our styles and templates to use a different accent color from the clients' palette and streamlined some of our button styles to ensure that content remains visible regardless of any branding customizations.

Staff Page Navigation

Our previous staff page template featured a carousel with many sets of staff members. In our accessibility testing, we discovered that the top portion of the template was not navigable by keyboard and that updates to the carousel (such as switching to the next set of people) were not properly announced to screen readers. We redesigned the top portion of this template to use a scrolling region instead, which makes navigation by keyboard or mouse much easier.

Some operating systems hide scrollbars when there is not direct interaction with the scrollable content. We made sure that our scrollable region has a visible scrollbar regardless of operating system to signify that additional staff members are visible on the page.

We also avoided the “keyboard trap” where keyboard users would have to press the Tab key many, many times to navigate from the top of the page, through all of the staff member thumbnails, and finally into an individual staff member’s profile or contact information. With a large team, all of those extra key presses can really add up. The Tab key lets users navigate into the scrollable region, and the arrow keys can be used to switch between profiles. Now, keyboard users can jump from the top of the page to the scrolling staff list and then directly to any profile content – that’s just 3 stops instead of countless more!

Upcoming Improvements & Events

Comboboxes

We’re actively working on extending a free, open-source combobox module from one of the leaders in accessibility testing. Once this work is completed, our improved comboboxes will be available in forms throughout the VCC, such as the Labor Market Insights and Outcome Data Visualization modules. Even better yet, we’ll be keeping our combobox code updates freely available for others to use and build upon – even if they aren’t uConnect customers.

WCAG 2.2 AA Compliance

When we outlined work in our recent VPAT update, we also noted the improvements to make for the most recent WCAG 2.2 standard, which introduced 9 new success criteria. We already meet many of them, and we’ve identified the remaining tasks for our future updates.

Live Session on May 2

Join us on May 2 for a live session on accessibility best practices with Stephy Miehle, a frontend engineer and accessibility advocate at uConnect. More details to come!

Hi there,

📣 We're so excited to share with you the new and improved Candid Career+

This update stemmed from both amazing feedback from current users, as well as a firm belief that video is a critical component of your modern digital content strategy. Together, we're bringing some must-have features straight to your virtual career center dashboard, to make it easier than ever to leverage video content and engage your students with the content and advice they need to inform their career journeys. (And not to mention, a snazzy new logo!)

🎁 What's included

So without further ado, let's get into the features! We've summarized each feature update below, including:

• more high quality video content streaming straight to your dashboard, available in a new external video library from a growing list of high quality video partners!
• an entirely new viewing experience, in which you can create and manage playlists and share them directly with your students
• easier access to share videos proactively, now that video content is available in your automated alerts and you can embed Candid Career branded videos directly from your dashboard!
• added ability to regularly shuffle the videos that appear in your video widgets to surface more of your relevant content!
• a new opportunity to set expectations on viewing with video duration, now automatically included on your video posts!
• an improved user experience via a refreshed 'video segment' layout for Candid Career+ branded videos (Loves & Challenges, Job Description, etc.)

💻 Resource hub

For more information on any of the new features above, check out any of these resources:

• Want to dig into how-to guides and best practices? Search our Knowledge Base for any of the features mentioned above to learn more!
• Want to self-explore? Find interactive Tool Tips scattered throughout your dashboard, with relevant advice and articles that will open up right within your dashboard to show you the ropes in using any new feature!
• Want an all-inclusive view of the new module? Refer back to our announcement message that showed up when you logged into your dashboard (saved in your red support bubble) for access to a guided tour that will walk you through all the new features in real time!

Hi there,

We now offer curated support for three new student populations!

• Student Athletes
• Students with Disabilities, and
• Women

With these kits, you can automatically curate meaningful content designed to speak to the specific considerations, experiences, and challenges of each population.

Let us doing the heavy lifting of...

• finding partners working with these populations,
• sourcing and formatting the content,
• maintaining an editorial calendar, and
• vetting for career relevancy!

All you have to do, is sit back and watch the kits do their magic. ✨

If you're interested in learning more, check out our virtual demo, or let us know if you'd like to learn about pricing!