The University of Teacher Education in Special Needs (HfH) Utilizes Drupal
The HfH is a specific educational university with a focus on curative and special educational issues, designed to meet the purpose of “education for all” – science-based, practice-oriented and broadly anchored. After the pitch process, Dream Production was allowed to relaunch its complex and comprehensive website.
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Drupal platform for HfH - certified for accessibility according to WCAG 2.1 at level AA+
The Briefing
Dream Production was commissioned to implement and relaunch the website and platform hfh.ch based on the rough concept developed by Eyekon. The first thing to do was to develop a content-related, technically and visually detailed concept for the comprehensive functionalities.
The website contains extensive content of various types: educational courses, publications, people, etc. These diverse content types are intelligently linked via sophisticated, multi-level tagging vocabularies, and relevant content is aggregated and displayed at various locations on the website – be it content pages, articles, scientific projects or shop items. For the implementation, the CMF Drupal has almost imposed itself.
Connection to the Azure Active Directory and Daylight
Furthermore, the website includes an integration with the Azure Active Directory, which, on the one hand, synchronises all employees and makes them accessible in the person finder and, on the other hand, it provides a single sign-on so that employees can maintain their profile, enter scientific publications or order at reduced prices in the webshop.
The further training offer is synchronized via the Daylight educational software and displayed in the further training planner.
Database for publications
In addition, a framework was implemented that allows the Research & Development department to administrate scientific projects and related publications. The publications are issued according to the APA standard on the website or on the employee profiles. These structured data are synchronized with the internal research database via REST interfaces.
Webshop for educational media
The website also has an integrated web shop where employees or students can buy educational media at a reduced price. The web shop is operated by the HfH library and it is integrated with the on-site shop. Both the inventory and the cash desk of the library are processed via the online shop.
Accessibility
As an educational institution focused on special and remedial education, it is crucial that the website is optimized and certified according to the WCAG 2.1 AA+ accessibility standard. This goal was achieved, and access-for-all.ch issued the corresponding certificate after an intensive review in 2023.
