Feature and accessibility improvements now live on Red

Posted on January 21, 2026

On Dec. 18, 2025, several codebase updates were deployed to the Red production server. These enhancements are now live across all Red-hosted sites and support improved accessibility, usability, and overall site performance. No action is required from site managers.

Feature improvements

  • Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin. Installed Seriously Simple Podcasting version 3.14.0. If your site requires podcasting functionality, you may request that this plugin be enabled for your individual site
  • New default user avatar for Profiles. Fixed an issue where the fallback Directory image did not load when a Profile lacked a headshot. Sites now display this gender-neutral default avatar if the Profile image is missing or removed from the Media Library.

Accessibility improvements

  • Increased contrast ratio for GDPR footer button. Resolved auto-detected WCAG contrast issue between foreground text and background color in the GDPR Cookie Settings button in the site footer.
  • Increased contrast ratio for text entered in Search box. This resolves an auto-detected contrast issue when the site header's Search field is in active use.
  • Render the expected tooltip message when a keyboard activates a heading permalink button. Prior to the fix for this manually-detected issue, the "Link Copied" tooltip appeared only after successful button activation with a mouse. As of the December 2025 deployment, the heading permalink button exhibits full mouse:keyboard parity and generates the same "Link Copied" message when the Enter or Spacebar key is pressed.
  • Render a complete focus indicator around all four sides when an element receives tabbed focus. Previously, hyperlinks in either of the Text Block components (added using the "Include link list" feature) displayed a visible focus indicator on the left, right, and bottom when in focus. Web browsers will now render the focus indicator around all four sides of the link. While WCAG Success Criterion 2.4.7 does not explicitly require focus indicators to completely surround elements receiving DOM focus, staff SME cites the known failure technique F78 (focus visibility negatively affected by styling) as grounds for enhancing the visibility of focused links in this basic component.

These updates reflect our ongoing commitment to accessibility and usability standards.

Modified on January 22, 2026