Fulcrum Year End Update - 2016 Edition

2016 is winding down, but the Fulcrum development team has been as busy as ever. Here’s a rundown of what’s been happening since our initial beta launch in October.

We began our project of displaying metrics to demonstrate the use of content on the platform. For a start, we’re pulling page views for each asset from Google Analytic’s API and displaying them under the ‘Stats’ tab on the asset page. Also, as part of a book’s summary description, we display the total page views for all assets related to that book. (You can currently find this total just above the ISBNs.) This is just the tip of the iceberg, and we have plans to introduce more metrics in the future to help publishers and authors demonstrate the benefits their content gains from publication on Fulcrum.

Fulcrum has also redoubled its efforts in pursuit of accessibility, setting our aim at WCAG 2.0 AA conformance. Most recently, we have made improvements to color contrast and have added more skip links. In 2017, the site will undergo a functional accessibility assessment, including a usability test with assistive technology, in partnership with Web Accessibility Coordinator at University of Michigan’s Office of Institutional Equity. Also in 2017, Fulcrum will adopt AblePlayer for playback of all audio and video content. AblePlayer offers better keyboard controls and caption support than the browser-native players our users currently rely on.

You will also find a number of features added lately to improve general usability. Search results now feature a number of new options for sorting. Asset pages display breadcrumbs to give a better sense of an object’s context within the collection. Much more to come in 2017!