Universal Accessibility Interest Group

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Charge: Offers librarians, support staff, students, and other advocates networking and collaboration opportunities, information sharing and programming to promote accessibility in academic libraries, including web accessibility, assistive technology, reference and instruction for users with disabilities and captioning processes.
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ALAMW 2011 ACRL/LITA/ASCLA Universal Accessibility Interest Group joint meeting notes

  • 1.  ALAMW 2011 ACRL/LITA/ASCLA Universal Accessibility Interest Group joint meeting notes

    Posted Jan 18, 2011 03:36 PM

    Sunday 1/9/11, 4:30pm

    Written by Adina Mulliken after the meeting. Ranti Junus added some notes as well.

    Number of attendees: 12

    Attendees are invited to subscribe to the ACRL Universal Accessibility mailing list http://lists.ala.org/sympa/info/uniaccess

     

    Ideas for promoting web accessibility among vendors:

    Create a non-monetary (since we don’t have money) award for accessible vendor(s).  Endorsement by larger divisions of ALA would be good.

    Work with library consortia to get accessibility included in RFPs

    Nina McHale volunteered to contact the editor of Charleston Advisor, a publication about electronic resources, to ask them to include the vendor’s statement about compliance with Section 508 and WCAG as well as whether they have a VPAT statement available.

    An Electronic Resources in Libraries conference held every year in Austin was mentioned where someone could present a paper about accessibility.

    Ranti and Nina are thinking about doing something with LITA National Forum.  Maybe a preconference because to give a regular paper your topic has to get voted in.

    Finding ways to communicate/advocate with Springshare about the need for skip navigation, form labels, and heading structure was suggested.  Adina had emailed them about this a long time ago but not sure where to go from there.

    Suggestion to have program about how Ebsco improved their accessibility while working with University of  Illinois to do user testing with people who have disabilities.  The conference is in Chicago, near where some of these people work, in June/July 2013. Suggestion that for future user testing it might help to include a public service librarian familiar with user behavior.

     

    An attendeed reported that ALCTS Electronic Resources IG talked about accessibility.
     
    NISO webminar on accessibility; we still need tools to assess accessibility.

     

    Resources mentioned:

    Fangs (a FireFox Addon) - http://www.standards-schmandards.com/projects/fangs/

    Webaim - http://webaim.org/

    Certified Accessible Technician program in CA

    LITA online training about accessibility was done by Nina.  Still available?

    Webinar on disability regulations in March by Mary Minow, info people - http://www.infopeople.org/training/webcasts/list

    Libraries and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act - http://www.resnaprojects.org/nattap/goals/telecom/508/boyer.html

     

    Other topics: