Digital Library Services are constantly developing services to become more accessible. A recent website refresh aims to vastly improve the customer experience for mobile and tablet users whilst also making more general accessibility improvements across the board such as ensuring ALT text is used wherever possible as well as checking the reading order and contrast. WAVE – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool is a free browser plugin which helps developers achieve this. A longer term website redevelopment aims to improve the underlying content structure and writing style of the website.
Whilst Digital Library Services aren’t always the developers of all of the systems used by the library and its customers, they are working with software partners to ensure accessibility needs are met or are in the process of being redeveloped or improved. Whether this be with LTDS or the IT Service (who develop the Newcastle University app) here in the University or Ex Libris who provide systems such as Alma, Primo (Library Search) and Leganto (Reading Lists). Other vendors such as Springshare (LibGuides and LibAnswers) or Third Iron (Browzine).
Example:
Library Search accessibility information (Primo by Ex Libris)
Watch the cross-sectional video to find out what the Marketing and Communications Group have been doing to create a more accessible visual identity.
Cross-sectional video will be uploaded soon.
One of the key areas where Liaison and the Writing Development Centre needed to make speedy improvements, was in the teaching materials we shared online and especially the materials we added to Blackboard. When running accessibility checks on our existing workbooks and presentations, we discovered that while the materials may have looked pretty, the content was often unintelligible to screen readers and included a lot of poor practice.
By using in-built styles and features in Word, our workbooks and guides can be interpreted by screen readers and edited by the reader to meet their needs (e.g. increase the font size or change the background colour).
The Writing Development Centre Study Guides and the Teach Yourself EndNote Guides are good examples of the new Word template in practice.
The Liaison Team create newsletters for Student Voice Committees, updates for academic colleagues and annual action plans, which have been created using Publisher in the past. Sway is a valuable alternative as it allows us to create newsletters that are more accessible, dynamic, embed multimedia and and can be corrected/ updated after publication. Accessibility features such as alternative text for images, captions, re-flowable/ re-sizeable content and in-built styles that screen readers understand, mean that our newsletters are now more accessible to all of our customers.
Take a look at an example produced by the SAgE team for a student voice committee and a Social Sciences example for academic colleagues.
Sway is also a valuable way to present information that may have been created as a video or shared on slideshare, both of which come with added accessibility complications. There are a few examples embedded into the Subject Guides, including this introduction to company information sources.
The teams use PowerPoint for most of our lectures and workshops. Using the old VI template put us in a position where any presentation we created included a multitude of errors. In addition, we were all falling into bad practice which meant that when materials were shared on Blackboard, the content was largely unusable for students.
As a team, we are creating all new teaching materials in the new Library VI template, and have used the PowerPoint accessibility checker to find errors and warnings in our added content. Over time we are moving all existing materials to the new template as materials are refreshed. In the Medical Sciences team, not only have they ensured all of their teaching materials are on the new templates, it has allowed them to rethink how they are preparing all of their teaching across the team.
Rather than creating numerous different slide presentations for each cohort, the team have rationalised their teaching materials down to five core topic areas which they can elaborate on during teaching. The Robust Searching Strategies presentation has been used to good effect from stage 1 through to PGR.