Author/Co-Author of two new LibGuides

What’s a LibGuide? Think of a LibGuide as a curated collection of topic specific resources like books, journals, databases, or websites. Pretty much all libraries have some version of LibGuides, though they might refer to them as resource guides, research guides, or subject guides. The goal of a LibGuide is to co-locate the most helpful materials that one would need to learn more about the guide’s topic. The one I am working on solo covers the topic of Dermatology and the one I am working on as part of a team addresses Accessibility and Disability.

Working on broken links

unlink by FontAwesome is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license

 

Website maintenance is a never ending task, kind of like dishes or laundry. Today’s goal was to identify and fix as many broken links as I could find on the DML website and on the LibGuides to which I contribute. Thanks to SiteImprove, that task was made a bit easier. It is so satisfying to see our Quality Assurance scores climb!

Now it’s time to tackle the laundry…

 

 

Accessibility

I have discussed accessibility in one of my earlier posts, Web Accessibility, it’s the right thing to do, in the context of providing captions and tables of contents for online videos. But accessibility practices extend so much farther than that. Content managers can make web pages accessible by the following methods:

• structuring web pages correctly with the proper HTML tags
• providing alternative text for images on pages
• choosing text and background colors with adequate contrast to enhance readability
• using arialabel attributes to define page elements; allowing them to be identified by screen readers and assistive device technologies

And these are just a few examples!

Besides making web pages accessible, library content managers can and should make PDF documents, LibGuides, and other publications accessible. When working with PDFs for example, it is preferable to design the source document (e.g. the Word document) to be as accessible and possible so that when you save it as a PDF, the accessibility features carry over. If you don’t have the source file, it is still possible to remediate the PDF file to make it more accessible, but the process is much more time consuming and laborious. Adobe Acrobat DC has accessibility features built in to the software. Here is a screen shot of the document opened in Adobe Acrobat DC, with some of the accessibility menus open.

I experimented with designing for accessibility in Word and in Adobe Acrobat DC when I created a new EBM search process document for use in our DML literature search workshops. View the accessible version of EBM search process document and learn how to become an expert database searcher! If you don’t require assistive devices, you won’t be able to appreciate the PDFs accessibility features, but they are there.