Universal Accessibility Interest Group

Good morning and Happy Friday!

Anaya and I would like to welcome all our new and established members of the Universal Accessibilty Interest Group. We are excited to start off a new year and to serve the accessibility needs of our colleagues. Some initial ideas we have include monthly engagement questions and sharing via the discussion board, invited speakers and more. As we start the new cycle, if any new members would like to introduce themselves and share a little bit about what you are doing at your institutions, that would be great! Anaya and I will kick that off. 

As always, please do not hesitate to use this space to lean into the expertise of other librarians. We are all in this together working to ensure equity of access for our users...and our collective efforts and voices are always stronger together.

Our best,

Trisha & Anaya

------------------------------
Trisha Prevett
ELearning Librarian
Southern New Hampshire University, Shapiro Library
She/Her/Hers
------------------------------

Hello UAIG!

I am very excited to be your incoming convener this year! I'm Anaya Jones (she/her) MLIS, CPACC. I recently joined the Northeastern University library as the Accessibility and Online Learning Librarian. Here, I'll focus on the accessibility of our learning experiences and objects.

Until now, my experience working with accessibility has been something that wasn't intrinsic to my job description. I've worked with individual students, to remediate library materials, with vendors, and on better workflows to increase equity and access. I feel that accessibility is an important part of library missions, and that we all have a role to play in increasing accessibility.

------------------------------
Anaya Jones She/Her/Hers
___
Accessibility & Online Learning Librarian
------------------------------

Hello again!

My name is Trisha and I use she/her pronouns. I am an eLearning Librarian at Southern New Hampshire University and have been there for about 8 years. As one of the largest education providers, we work with a large number of students that have disabilities and struggle to use our digital content both in the LMS and within library databases and systems. This has spurred me to learn everything that I can about accessibility, disability, user experience, UDL and more so that I can be an ally and advocate within my library and institution. I've recently acquired my IAAP CPACC or certified professional in accessibililty core compenctencies and am leading a cross departmental  working group focused on providing accessibilty training at SNHU. 

I look forward to connecting with you all!

Best,

Trisha

------------------------------
Trisha Prevett
ELearning Librarian
Southern New Hampshire University, Shapiro Library
She/Her/Hers
------------------------------

Hello!
I'm Rachel (she/her/hers), an Instruction and Engagement Librarian at the University of Central Florida. Our institution recently adopted a Digital Accessibility Policy, and I'm part of the group working on creating guidelines for our librarians for updating their content and creating new content, particularly videos, that's WCAG 2.0 AA compliant. This is a little new to me, so if anyone has any suggestions about resources explaining the basics of audio description, it would be greatly appreciated!

Also interested, more broadly, in accessibility and library instruction. Glad to be part of the group!


------------------------------
Rachel Edford
Instruction & Engagement Librarian
University of Central Florida
She/Her/Hers
------------------------------

Hello and Welcome!

WCAG has advisory pages that supplement the guidelines- you may find some of these helpful. For example, Using the track element to provide audio descriptions.  

Whenever possible, I try to include pertinent visual information in the narration of videos created to share library and instructional content. These videos are often narrated in a way that feature films are not always, and so the audio description can be incorporated into the narration. Is anyone else doing this? Does it have drawbacks I'm not thinking of? I'm happy to chat.

------------------------------
Anaya Jones She/Her/Hers
___
Accessibility & Online Learning Librarian
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Jul 11, 2022 07:57 AM
From: Rachel Edford
Subject: Welcome New and Established UAIG Members!

Hello!
I'm Rachel (she/her/hers), an Instruction and Engagement Librarian at the University of Central Florida. Our institution recently adopted a Digital Accessibility Policy, and I'm part of the group working on creating guidelines for our librarians for updating their content and creating new content, particularly videos, that's WCAG 2.0 AA compliant. This is a little new to me, so if anyone has any suggestions about resources explaining the basics of audio description, it would be greatly appreciated!

Also interested, more broadly, in accessibility and library instruction. Glad to be part of the group!


------------------------------
Rachel Edford
Instruction & Engagement Librarian
University of Central Florida
She/Her/Hers
------------------------------

Here's a ridiculously late response to this introduction thread!  My name is Adina Mulliken.  I'm a social work librarian at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY).  We have faculty status here, so I also have title of Associate Professor, but I'm a librarian, not on the teaching faculty.

I've been very happy that Anaya has agreed to lead this group!!! Also that Trisha has led it for the past year:).   

As far as what accessibility topics I'm working on, one of my main focuses lately has been working, with  several student employees and staff, on improving accessibility of our e-reserves, primarily by replacing copies of PDFs that have marks/highlighting/handwriting, etc. with cleaner and OCR'ed copies.  This involves thousands of documents, so is a pretty big project.  

Adina



------------------------------
Adina Mulliken
Social Work Subject Specialist & Assistant Professor
Hunter College, CUNY
New York, NY
She/Her/Hers
am2621@hunter.cuny.edu
------------------------------

Adina,

You're just fashionably late! The project you're working on sounds great- Are there elements of that project that are a particular challenge? If someone else were to undertake a similar project, what advice would you give them?

------------------------------
Anaya Jones She/Her/Hers
___
Accessibility & Online Learning Librarian
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Sep 07, 2022 03:22 PM
From: Adina Mulliken
Subject: Welcome New and Established UAIG Members!

Here's a ridiculously late response to this introduction thread!  My name is Adina Mulliken.  I'm a social work librarian at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY).  We have faculty status here, so I also have title of Associate Professor, but I'm a librarian, not on the teaching faculty.

I've been very happy that Anaya has agreed to lead this group!!! Also that Trisha has led it for the past year:).

As far as what accessibility topics I'm working on, one of my main focuses lately has been working, with  several student employees and staff, on improving accessibility of our e-reserves, primarily by replacing copies of PDFs that have marks/highlighting/handwriting, etc. with cleaner and OCR'ed copies.  This involves thousands of documents, so is a pretty big project.

Adina



------------------------------
Adina Mulliken
Social Work Subject Specialist & Assistant Professor
Hunter College, CUNY
New York, NY
She/Her/Hers
am2621@hunter.cuny.edu
------------------------------

Haha, thanks for giving me that excuse Anaya:).  

So more about our e-reserves accessibility project... I don't know where to start but here are a few details.

-It has taken an effort to try not to bite off too much at once.  I think everyone involved feels like we should have everything accessible for students immediately, which we should,  but we don't have resources to make that happen, so we have to pace ourselves.

- We're using Google spreadsheets to track our checking of whether the current e-reserves docs are clean or messy, whether they're OCR'ed, whether we've figured out the citation to the doc, and which of many steps we've taken to get better copies.  I expect there are ways to improve on the gigantic spreadsheets we have.  If there are any spreadsheet experts reading this who would be interested to help (AFTER my instruction season goes by in Oct/Nov, haha), that would be great.  

-We started trying to use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to OCR the documents.  I had heard that Acrobat wasn't as good as ABBYY FineReader and maybe Omni but folks on our campus thought Acrobat would be good enough, plus we already had a license.  However, e-reserves staff found Acrobat often showed a LOT of potential errors that need to be checked, so we're not using Acrobat regularly anymore.   We've had agreement for funding to get ABBYY (yay!) for a long time, but the  staff for processing budgets and tech is very thin here compared to at richer schools,  so I'm still hoping it will not be too much longer to get ABBYY.  Most documents we're finding already OCR'ed from other sources, but I also have some large folders of docs waiting for ABBYY.  


------------------------------
Adina Mulliken
Social Work Subject Specialist & Assistant Professor
Hunter College, CUNY
New York, NY
She/Her/Hers
am2621@hunter.cuny.edu
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Sep 12, 2022 10:48 AM
From: Anaya Jones
Subject: Welcome New and Established UAIG Members!

Adina,

You're just fashionably late! The project you're working on sounds great- Are there elements of that project that are a particular challenge? If someone else were to undertake a similar project, what advice would you give them?

------------------------------
Anaya Jones She/Her/Hers
___
Accessibility & Online Learning Librarian
------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: Sep 07, 2022 03:22 PM
From: Adina Mulliken
Subject: Welcome New and Established UAIG Members!

Here's a ridiculously late response to this introduction thread!  My name is Adina Mulliken.  I'm a social work librarian at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY).  We have faculty status here, so I also have title of Associate Professor, but I'm a librarian, not on the teaching faculty.

I've been very happy that Anaya has agreed to lead this group!!! Also that Trisha has led it for the past year:).

As far as what accessibility topics I'm working on, one of my main focuses lately has been working, with  several student employees and staff, on improving accessibility of our e-reserves, primarily by replacing copies of PDFs that have marks/highlighting/handwriting, etc. with cleaner and OCR'ed copies.  This involves thousands of documents, so is a pretty big project.

Adina



------------------------------
Adina Mulliken
Social Work Subject Specialist & Assistant Professor
Hunter College, CUNY
New York, NY
She/Her/Hers
am2621@hunter.cuny.edu

As I mentioned, I recently spent a lot of time comparing and researching software related to accessibility, so I completely agree that getting a sense for, and access to, the best tool for the project can be a challenge.

I've also heard that ABBYY is great for OCR, in my experience, it isn't great for fixing incorrect tag structure, if that's ever something you start to look at.

------------------------------
Anaya Jones She/Her/Hers
___
Accessibility & Online Learning Librarian
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: Sep 20, 2022 02:26 PM
From: Adina Mulliken
Subject: Welcome New and Established UAIG Members!

Haha, thanks for giving me that excuse Anaya:).

So more about our e-reserves accessibility project... I don't know where to start but here are a few details.

-It has taken an effort to try not to bite off too much at once.  I think everyone involved feels like we should have everything accessible for students immediately, which we should,  but we don't have resources to make that happen, so we have to pace ourselves.

- We're using Google spreadsheets to track our checking of whether the current e-reserves docs are clean or messy, whether they're OCR'ed, whether we've figured out the citation to the doc, and which of many steps we've taken to get better copies.  I expect there are ways to improve on the gigantic spreadsheets we have.  If there are any spreadsheet experts reading this who would be interested to help (AFTER my instruction season goes by in Oct/Nov, haha), that would be great.

-We started trying to use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to OCR the documents.  I had heard that Acrobat wasn't as good as ABBYY FineReader and maybe Omni but folks on our campus thought Acrobat would be good enough, plus we already had a license.  However, e-reserves staff found Acrobat often showed a LOT of potential errors that need to be checked, so we're not using Acrobat regularly anymore.   We've had agreement for funding to get ABBYY (yay!) for a long time, but the  staff for processing budgets and tech is very thin here compared to at richer schools,  so I'm still hoping it will not be too much longer to get ABBYY.  Most documents we're finding already OCR'ed from other sources, but I also have some large folders of docs waiting for ABBYY.


------------------------------
Adina Mulliken
Social Work Subject Specialist & Assistant Professor
Hunter College, CUNY
New York, NY
She/Her/Hers
am2621@hunter.cuny.edu
------------------------------


Original Message:
Sent: Sep 12, 2022 10:48 AM
From: Anaya Jones
Subject: Welcome New and Established UAIG Members!

Adina,

You're just fashionably late! The project you're working on sounds great- Are there elements of that project that are a particular challenge? If someone else were to undertake a similar project, what advice would you give them?

------------------------------
Anaya Jones She/Her/Hers
___
Accessibility & Online Learning Librarian


Original Message:
Sent: Sep 07, 2022 03:22 PM
From: Adina Mulliken
Subject: Welcome New and Established UAIG Members!

Here's a ridiculously late response to this introduction thread!  My name is Adina Mulliken.  I'm a social work librarian at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY).  We have faculty status here, so I also have title of Associate Professor, but I'm a librarian, not on the teaching faculty.

I've been very happy that Anaya has agreed to lead this group!!! Also that Trisha has led it for the past year:).

As far as what accessibility topics I'm working on, one of my main focuses lately has been working, with  several student employees and staff, on improving accessibility of our e-reserves, primarily by replacing copies of PDFs that have marks/highlighting/handwriting, etc. with cleaner and OCR'ed copies.  This involves thousands of documents, so is a pretty big project.

Adina



------------------------------
Adina Mulliken
Social Work Subject Specialist & Assistant Professor
Hunter College, CUNY
New York, NY
She/Her/Hers
am2621@hunter.cuny.edu