Can Students Print From Their Phone Using Pharos?

This question is so common that I'm not going to waste your time with a preamble.

 Short Answer: Yes, but it's Pharos so the method to do so is obnoxious.

 The Method

Pharos does not have a functional mobile website, nor does it have an phone application that students can use. (It does have an app you can download, but as far as I've seen our campus is not set up for it, and even if it was the app is barely functional.)

What you'll need to do is show students how to request the desktop website from their phone's web browser.

Here are support pages for how to do this in both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox's mobile applications.

Google Chrome

Mozilla Firefox

Safari

Unfortunately, the smartphone that the majority of people have is an iPhone. The process for requesting the desktop site on Safari depends on which version of iOS the phone is running. Naturally, Apple has no desire to support its older machines and software, and thus there are no official help pages for this (that I could find at time of writing.)

The best I can give you is a series of screenshots that I've "borrowed" from Prince William Count School's IT knowledge base. The page was created 6 months prior to this article. The process for the most recent iOS may have changed if you are reading this far into the future.

Figure 1: An iPhone screenshot running Safari. The options button is located near the bottom, left-hand side of the screen, just above the back arrow and next to the address bar.

Figure 2: An iPhone screenshot running Safari with the options menu open. The button to see more options is located in the bottom right-hand corner.

Figure 3: An iPhone screenshot with Safari's Page Menu open. The recommended option is under "website settings for example.com."

I highly recommend that in all cases you use the "Request Desktop Website" toggle instead of the first "Request Desktop Website" that appears first on the page menu. This ensures that the student's device will request the desktop website every time they navigate to the Pharos address.

 Important Final Step

In many, many cases the student's phone will not display the correct website after you have selected "Request Desktop Website," or even if you refresh the page. To fix this you must back out of the Pharos page, and then re-enter it.

Once you are able to pull up the Pharos desktop website, the student should be able to upload documents to it as usual.

If All Else Fails

This method has worked consistently for me, but in the event that something goes wrong direct the student to use one of the guest computers to print out their documents instead.