As a disabled student, my academic career was rife with difficulty accessing both classroom spaces and digital learning platforms. Having heard similar concerns from other students at both my undergraduate and graduate institutions, I was interested in using my MLIS capstone project as an opportunity to find pathways to make higher education more accessible to all students.
I spent the 2023-24 academic year investigating whether a selection of courses offered by University of Washington’s iSchool provided accessible classroom materials according to the legal standards currently in place for web accessibility. In Washington, that means abiding by Washington State Policy #188, which states that UW must provide materials congruent with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.1 Level AA standards. The results I found in my research can also be applied to the improvement of any digitally provided library resources. The following are the top five actions I believe libraries can take to make these materials, such as pre-recorded videos and newsletters, accessible to disabled library users.
Think about accessibility early. Are the text documents you’re providing available in an accessible format, such as PDF or EPUB? Do the pre-recorded videos you’d like to share have captions already provided? If not, you’ll need to do some work early on to ensure these materials meet accessibility standards. When creating materials from scratch, considering accessibility as a key portion of your timeline will ensure less time needs to be spent on remediation in the future. Some potential things to consider include whether the content or website would be accessible to people who are colorblind, have low vision, or cannot physically manipulate a mouse. To explore ways to ensure these types of users are able to access your material, I encourage you to explore the WCAG Version 2.1 guidelines.
Check that your pre-recorded videos have accurate captions. Automatically generated captions do not have the level of accuracy required to meet WCAG Version 2.1 Level AA standards. To make sure your self-produced videos meet the requirements, double check the automatically generated captions manually to ensure the captions match the audio. Once your captions are accurate, save them as a transcript document and upload it alongside your video, perhaps as a Dropbox link in the video’s description.
Check that your PDF documents are clean, legible, and run through Optical Character Recognition Software. It’s difficult for screen readers to be able to determine the language and sequence of text in some unremediated documents, especially those not born digital. To ensure library users who utilize these types of software can access digital PDF documents, run them through an Optical Character Recognition software, such as the functionality available through Adobe Acrobat. If you’re especially concerned about the accessibility of a document, send it to a document remediation service. University of Washington’s recommended provider for their staff is Crawford Technologies. Other service providers include Access Ingenuity, The Viscardi Center, and RemDoc, but others can be found by searching for document remediation services.
Choose images and graphics with appropriate levels of color contrast. When choosing a photograph or designing a graphic to embed in a document or on a website, especially if it’s meant to convey information, make sure to use colors which contrast each other. Photographs and images should have a 3:1 contrast and graphics with text should have a 4.5:1 contrast. To check contrast between two colors, use an online color picker to find the hex codes which represent the colors used, then use the WebAIM Contrast Checker to determine whether the colors meet the above standards. If they do not, find another image or choose different colors for the graphic.
Upload any slide decks associated with pre-recorded videos alongside the video. This allows library users to utilize screen readers to access content on your slide decks which they may otherwise be unable to access. To create accessible slide decks, UW Accessible Technology recommends using built-in slide templates, since they are designed to be accessible; writing unique titles for each slide so users can easily skim titles to navigate; setting the appropriate reading order for the contents of slides; including any links as a smart link within the text of the slide instead of as a stand-alone URL; and including alternative text for all images used in the slide deck.
If you’d like to learn more about my research or access the document recording my extended findings, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn or via email at [email protected].
Lex Van Horn recently graduated with their MLIS from the University of Washington and is a member of both WLA and ALA. They spent two years as a co-coordinator for iSTAMP, the UW iSchool's Student-to-Alumni Mentorship Program. When they aren't working, they're probably reading or exploring the state with their younger siblings.
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