I attended Sue Watling‘s workshop, ‘Promoting Inclusive Practice with Digital Data‘, today. (I know that Sue has delivered the same workshop in the past to groups of Library staff.) There’s also a Blackboard community to accompany the workshop.
My particular interest in usability / accessibility / inclusive design, as Sue knows, is around the accessible nature (or otherwise) of Library-digitised and born-digital library subscription resources: e-books, e-journals, and material scanned and digitised under the CLA’s comprehensive HE licence.
In particular, Sue and I have had a number of conversations about the frustrations we share around digital texts: which ought to be inherently accessible and a great asset, but which in practice are often only available in a form (or via a platform) covered in barriers to accessibility. Also around the lack of importance which the University can seem to place on accessibility, usability and access issues.
A little while ago, Sue and I made a start on an e-book usability/accessibility reference guide. To my shame (because I do think it’s important, it’s something that doesn’t get a lot of attention, and it’s something I’m interested in) …I let it fall by the wayside.
I’ve made a start again! It’s made up of a table containing information about the features of the three Library e-book platforms which are available at the University of Lincoln, plus a guide to using e-books. Both parts are publicly-editable Google documents, so feel free to edit them.
[...] but in relation to operating within digital environments. Take-up on the sessions isn’t great. Paul Stainthorp has suggested this could be symptomatic of the lack of importance placed on accessibility, usability [...]