The FirstVoices development team has been working hard on the new release, which sees the launch of new features, as well as solutions to bugs and glitches on the site. In addition, we’ve also published new information on our blog. All of these updates have been prompted by the hard-working Language Teams and community members, whose valuable feedback, ideas and suggestions have been crucial in making FirstVoices a better platform.

If you have questions about any of the updates listed below, or have ideas for ways to improve FirstVoices, please contact us at: hello@firstvoices.com

New features

Customizable categories

Please note: This feature is currently being rolled out across archives. If you don’t see this feature enabled on your archive by July 15, 2020, please contact hello@firstvoices.com.

Language Administrators can now add custom categories to their FirstVoices sites!

• You can now edit, add and delete categories on your FirstVoices site. Learn more here: https://wiki.firstvoices.com/display/FIR1/Adding+and+editing+categories
• This includes renaming categories in your own language so that your learners have a more immersive experience!
• Only Language Administrators can add and edit categories. Before a recorder (or recorder with approval) can add a custom category to a word entry, it must first be created by the language administrator

• Old categories that aren’t attached to any word entries will no longer display in the side menu (for example, if the Marsupials category is empty, that category will no longer show up as an option)

• Batch uploads support new categories that you create/edit on FirstVoices
  
  

YouTube videos can be embedded into text areas

• You can now embed Youtube videos into area where custom text is allowed
• For example, on your archive’s homepage, language page, and within songs and stories
• Click on the Edit button, and then find the ’film’ icon
• Click on the film icon and paste in a link to a Youtube video in order to embed it into that text area

’Confusable characters’ now help ensure consistency across an archive

In some archives, the FirstVoices platform was dealing with the issue of ’confusable characters’. These are characters that look very similar, but are actually completely different in the eyes of a computer. When confusable characters exist in an archive, features like alphabetization and search may not work as well as they should.

The confusable characters feature allows the FirstVoices development team to:

• Add potential ’confusable characters’ into the backend of an alphabet, so that the FirstVoices platform can detect when they show up in your entries
• Scan existing entries for the confusables characters and automatically change them to the correct alphabet character
• Prevent future entries from accidentally including confusable characters, by detecting them upon the creation of a new entry and automatically changing them to the correct alphabet character without any additional effort required on the Language Team’s end
• This will improve alphabetization and search functionality within FirstVoices archives as well as FirstVoices apps

Bug fixes

Kids Portal is back up and running

After resolving a few issues, the FirstVoices Kids Portal is now pulling the right content, and the search function is now displaying the appropriate kids search layout instead of the standard FirstVoices search bar. 

FirstVoices Keyboards app is displaying special characters and long-press characters properly

A recent iOS update for iPhones and iPad caused certain special characters as well as long-press characters which require users to ’press and hold’ to disappear from the FirstVoices Keyboards app. That is now resolved, and updating or re-downloading the app on your Apple device will fix this issue.

Clicking on a character on the alphabet grid now displays results more accurately

• Previously, clicking on a character using the Browse Alphabetically grid would return partially incorrect results
• For example, clicking on the character ’e’ would return words that started with both ’e’ and ’ee’
• The algorithm has now been recalculated to ensure a greater level of accuracy across different alphabets

New documentation

Looking for support, or to learn something new? Here is the new documentation that has been added to our Blog & Knowledge Base:

• /wiki/spaces/FIR1/pages/1705993
• /wiki/spaces/FIR1/pages/1705888
• Contributors License Agreement v1.0.0

Contact us

Send us your questions, concerns, ideas, bugs and feedback at hello@firstvoices.com!