303 Doe, 10:30-11:30a
Participants: Beth Dupuis (chair), Mark Marrow, Lynne Grigsby, Patrick Shannon, Steve Mendoza, Salwa Ismail, Sherry Lochhaas, Susan Xue, Jennifer Dorner, David Wong, Trina Pundurs, Jesse Loesberg, Jutta Weimhoff, Julie Lefevre, Lisa Weber, Neda Salem, Nicole Brown, Susan McElrath, Jenifer Carter, Vaughn Egge, Chan Li, Tor Haugen
I. Welcome to AUL Salwa Ismail + introductions
II. Local practice with punctuation in MARC records (10 min, Trina Pundurs)
Cataloging and Metadata Council shared news of the Library of Congress Program for Cooperative Cataloging change in punctuation in MARC records. The change is appearing in incoming vendor records (e.g. from GOBI, Casalini, etc.) as well as records from the Shared Cataloging Program and the records we create. Phase 1 is already underway and relates to punctuation at the end of field; Phase 2 is yet to be implemented and relates to punctuation between fields. See shared document for details.
III. Proposal for making Tableau charts more accessible (20 min, Chan and Tor)
See document with background, goal, and proposal
Web Advisory Group members were invited to attend
As background, Library Assessment Advisory Group (LAAG) members gave an overview of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 and the importance of ensuring the content we create and publish online is "perceivable, operable, and understandable" to all users including those with sensory challenges (such as vision impairment). UCOP guidelines ask that all documents comply with the AA standard outlined in the WCAG 2.1 document, and we seek to do so with the forthcoming report about the findings of the Ithaka Faculty Survey.
Tableau is a data visualization tool that the Library is using, and which many other campus units use as well, for looking at our data. Tableau, not designed with accessibility as a consideration, is now publishing an auditing report to share new features they are developing to address these issues and a best practices document to guide how we as publishers should design for screen readers.
LAAG is preparing to share findings of the Ithaka Faculty Survey via a detailed report and a high-level news article; the article is currently designed with interactive Tableau elements in order to provide richer detail about the distinctions between disciplinary groups. Having identified Tableau's deficiencies related to accessibility, LAAG has developed a proposal for sharing this data and is seeking feedback from PSC and WAG. For non-interactive graphs, they propose embedding Excel workbooks which will be tested by Lucy Greco (UC web accessibility expert). For interactive tables, they propose creating separate image tables for each of the options.
Suggestions include: enabling access through keyboard only movements, adding alt tags for images, and running the Word document through its own audit to add necessary features. Another question was about exploring the use of HighCharts instead of Tableau but Tableau has broader possibilities for connecting with other campus data and departments who use this system and offer support. Members encouraged the LAAG team to connect with other universities who are investigating these issues too. One idea was to make the accessible version the primary version people see or to at least put the link higher toward the top of the article. Another suggestion was sharing the spreadsheet through Google Sheets and the document through Google Docs to avoid proprietary Microsoft software.
LAAG members will take these suggestions into consideration and work with Lead Team on the final implementation decisions.
IV. Ally accessibility tool demonstration (20 min, Jennifer Dorner)
Jennifer shared a useful overview document about Ally, now incorporated in bCourses. Ally is a tool adopted by a number of universities to raise awareness among faculty of the (in)accessibility of their course materials and to provide alt-media access to those materials.
For testing purposes, Jennifer has created a sandbox site in bCourses where she can upload documents and get meter assessment of accessibility. The meter will explain the reasons a document gets a high or low rating; in some cases, problems can be fixed in the Ally system but other problems need to be done in Word and then uploaded anew. Common remedies are adding alternative descriptions to images, adding headings to help with navigation, improving the contrast of colors, adding data that appear in tables, and correctly exporting Word docs as PDFs that are accessible.
Note that this tool does not do the remediation work (which DSP's alt-media staff does for required readings, and the Library does for the materials we provide for other meetings). The tool is only accessible through bCourses currently and is still in development but may include more advice to future for solving problems. The tool could be useful to the Library for testing how accessible the documents we produce are, and for making improvements to them before publication. The tool has also highlighted the problems with content we get from vendors which may be available as PDFs with OCR'd content but which prevents them from working effectively with screen readers.
Related to these discussions, Lisa Weber shared the URL for Web Access: https://webaccess.berkeley.edu/. At the bottom of the page is a section of links entitled "Tips for Making Your Site Accessible (and More)."