Accessible LibGuides Template

Digital accessibility is an essential part of our commitment to ensure a safe and welcoming environment for the campus and broader community. At a minimum, our LibGuides should meet OU Libraries' content policy, which includes adherence to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.2 AA standards. Conformance to accessibility standards is also our legal obligation as part of a federally funded institution (Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 508). In any situations that may impact accessibility where these requirements fall short, it is still our moral and ethical duty to find ways to make our content accessible.

While some aspects of SpringShare's LibGuides are accessible, not all of them are, at least by default. We have created a new template for our LibGuides to address some of these issues, and this guide will address the rest by helping users create accessible content. All existing guides will ultimately need to be edited as per the instructions in this guide.

How to Use This Guide

The pages on Creating Accessible Guides and LibGuides Content Types will be useful for creating new guides and editing existing ones, as they describe how to actually implement accessibility in your guides and reference general accessibility information not specific to SpringShare's LibGuides.

Because we recognize that editing guides to meet accessibility standards is a process and may not happen all at once, the Template Switchover page will provide some scaffolding to help break this down into more manageable steps. It will include dates by which all of your guides should meet each requirement.

The Typography Reference page can give you a brief overview of what the various elements and styles will look like. You may find this helpful, as some new formatting styles will not show up in the rich text editor.

We plan to include a page detailing notes on creating the new template as well as actual pieces of code. For other institutions using SpringShare's LibGuides, feel free to copy and paste anything that would be useful! There is currently not an estimated date for when this page will be released, but you may contact Magen Bednar for more information.

Because this guide focuses on accessibility as it relates to SpringShare's LibGuides, you will also want to reference general accessibility information to ensure that the content you create is accessible. There are two guides that are referenced in the Creating Accessible Guides and LibGuides Content Types, but you can also access them directly from this page.

Additional Notes

• Harvard has an interesting page with Writing tips for LibGuides that you may find interesting.
• Please note that while the public-facing guides will be vastly improved, there are many aspects of the editor that have not been touched, as that would be a massive undertaking and is outside the scope of this project.