Accessibility of Vendor-Created Video Tutorials for People with Disabilities

Many video, screencast, webinar, or interactive tutorials are created and provided by vendors for use by libraries to instruct users in database searching. This study investigates whether these vendor-created database tutorials are accessible for people with disabilities to see whether librarians can use these tutorials instead of creating them in-house. Findings on accessibility were mixed. Positive accessibility features and common accessibility problems are described, with recommendations on how to maximize accessibility

Guide on the Side and LibWizard Tutorials side-by-side: How do the two platforms for split-screen online tutorials compare?

Split-screen tutorials are an appealing and effective way for libraries to create online learning objects where learners interact with real-time web content. Many libraries are using the University of Arizona’s award-winning, open source platform, Guide on the Side; in 2016, Springshare released a proprietary alternative, LibWizard Tutorials. This article reviews the advantages and limitations of this kind of tutorial. It also examines the differences between each platform’s distinctive characteristics. These platforms create similar split-screen tutorials, but have differences that affect diverse aspects of installation, administration, authoring and editing, student learning, data management, and accessibility. Libraries now have the opportunity to consider and compare alternative platforms and decide which one is best suited to their needs, priorities and resources

Improving Screencast Accessibility for People with Disabilities: Guidelines and Techniques

Screencast video tutorials are increasingly popular in libraries, but may present access problems for people with disabilities unless specific accessibility features are added during screencast creation. This article reviews existing standards for accessible web-based multimedia and gives guidelines on how to create accessible screencasts based on these standards

Raising the Bar on Training at Valparaiso University

We have recently overhauled our IT training program that we offer our students, faculty and staff. In the past, the training program consisted of sessions about changes to campus systems or sessions related to very specific software uses such as mail merge or tables. Users can now expect that training will be more than software use and how-to’s. We have started looking at ways to enhance our clients overall use of campus technology. As we examined ways to better serve our campus community, we engaged in qualitative observations in many areas. We examined how our graduate students were using technology to collaborate. The faculty were observed by our training staff to see how they were employing campus technology in courses and integrating technology into their assignments given to students. We interviewed our Help Desk Student Consultants to see what they observed as major training goals throughout the campus based on their interactions with clients. Upon completion of our observations, we outline our course development plans for increasing technology integration and full use of our campus technology offerings to further our mission of enhancing learning, teaching and job function through technology. Our goal is to reach beyond the software functionality and take our clients to the apex of relevance and application

Human-powered smartphone assistance for blind people

Mobile devices are fundamental tools for inclusion and independence. Yet, there are still many open research issues in smartphone accessibility for blind people (Grussenmeyer and Folmer 2017). Currently, learning how to use a smartphone is non-trivial, especially when we consider that the need to learn new apps and accommodate to updates never ceases. When first transitioning from a basic feature-phone, people have to adapt to new paradigms of interaction. Where feature phones had a finite set of applications and functions, users can extend the possible functions and uses of a smartphone by installing new 3rd party applications. Moreover, the interconnectivity of these applications means that users can explore a seemingly endless set of workflows across applications. To that end, the fragmented nature of development on these devices results in users needing to create different mental models for each application. These characteristics make smartphone adoption a demanding task, as we found from our eight-week longitudinal study on smartphone adoption by blind people. We conducted multiple studies to characterize the smartphone challenges that blind people face, and found people often require synchronous, co-located assistance from family, peers, friends, and even strangers to overcome the different barriers they face. However, help is not always available, especially when we consider the disparity in each barrier, individual support network and current location. In this dissertation we investigated if and how in-context human-powered solutions can be leveraged to improve current smartphone accessibility and ease of use. Building on a comprehensive knowledge of the smartphone challenges faced and coping mechanisms employed by blind people, we explored how human-powered assistive technologies can facilitate use. The thesis of this dissertation is: Human-powered smartphone assistance by non-experts is effective and impacts perceptions of self-efficacy

Increasing Accessibility to Academic Library Services with Alt Text, Color Contrast, Captioning, and Transcripts in YouTube Tutorials

Accessibility of library resources and services in academic libraries is fundamental to serving the discovery and scholarship needs of students and faculty, regardless of disability status. Equitable access in higher education affects student grades and retention, and within the library, involves making library buildings, video tutorials, library instruction, the website, Libguides, and resources accessible to students. Accessibility is vital for disabled students to obtain a college degree. It complies with federal law while improving access to education for all students, such as English as a second language students, undiagnosed disabled students, and students with different learning styles. This article focuses on how using alt text, color contrast analysis, closed captioning, and transcripts can improve the accessibility of library video tutorials, assisting the disabled and non-disabled students alike in their discovery and scholarship

Complete LibTech 2013 Print Program

PDF of the complete print program from the 2013 Library Technology Conferenc

Improving the Power Electronics Laboratory teaching/learning process: an interactive web tool

European Higher Education Area; Power Electronics Laboratory; educational methods Resumen: The forthcoming European Higher Education Area implies an important change in the teaching/learning process: it is necessary to get students more involved as well as to promote their independence and active participation. To achieve this objective, the new teaching methodologies aimed at more effective and appropriate learning for professional practice involve the use of audiovisual, computer and multimedia tools on the part of lecturers. Therefore, a web tool, based on a content management system, has been developed for the teaching in Power Electronics Laboratory. Moreover, the use of these multimedia tools makes possible to promote the students independence. Finally, the use of this web tool results in a very significant increase in the motivation students.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The LONI QC System: A Semi-Automated, Web-Based and Freely-Available Environment for the Comprehensive Quality Control of Neuroimaging Data.

Quantifying, controlling, and monitoring image quality is an essential prerequisite for ensuring the validity and reproducibility of many types of neuroimaging data analyses. Implementation of quality control (QC) procedures is the key to ensuring that neuroimaging data are of high-quality and their validity in the subsequent analyses. We introduce the QC system of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI): a web-based system featuring a workflow for the assessment of various modality and contrast brain imaging data. The design allows users to anonymously upload imaging data to the LONI-QC system. It then computes an exhaustive set of QC metrics which aids users to perform a standardized QC by generating a range of scalar and vector statistics. These procedures are performed in parallel using a large compute cluster. Finally, the system offers an automated QC procedure for structural MRI, which can flag each QC metric as being 'good' or 'bad.' Validation using various sets of data acquired from a single scanner and from multiple sites demonstrated the reproducibility of our QC metrics, and the sensitivity and specificity of the proposed Auto QC to 'bad' quality images in comparison to visual inspection. To the best of our knowledge, LONI-QC is the first online QC system that uniquely supports the variety of functionality where we compute numerous QC metrics and perform visual/automated image QC of multi-contrast and multi-modal brain imaging data. The LONI-QC system has been used to assess the quality of large neuroimaging datasets acquired as part of various multi-site studies such as the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI) Study and the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). LONI-QC's functionality is freely available to users worldwide and its adoption by imaging researchers is likely to contribute substantially to upholding high standards of brain image data quality and to implementing these standards across the neuroimaging community