Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD).The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than one billion people in the world with disabilities/impairments.

In LCCOS, we are committed to removing barriers that may prevent students, staff or visitors from making the most of our services. Ensuring all content that you share is accessible with the people who will use it is vital. You should anticipate additional requirements to make content accessible.

There are a few small things you can do. Let us know in the comments if you have any further suggestions, questions or comments.

1. Make your Microsoft documents accessible

It’s relatively easy to make Word and PowerPoint documents accessible by following a few easy steps:

• Use appropriate document headers.
• Add meaningful hyperlink text.
• Give every slide a unique title.
• Make sure slide contents can be read in the correct order.
• Add alt text to images.
• Check font size and colour contrast.
• Ensure videos are accessible.

When finalising a document, you should use the Microsoft Accessibility Checker which reviews documents and offers an easy way to make improvements such as adding alt text to images and checking content order on slides.

This is especially important if you are uploading the document onto Moodle as Blackboard Ally, will automatically create accessible formats from Word and PowerPoints, but the original document must be accessible.

Read more

• Make your Word documents accessible (Microsoft Help Pages)
• Make your PowerPoint presentations (Microsoft Help Pages)
• Blackboard Ally (UCL news article from 2019)
• Blackboard Ally-What it is, why use it

2. Use alt text

Alt text or ‘alternative text’ explains what an image is showing. It is read by screen reader software

You can easily add alt text to images in MS documents, on webpages and on most social media platforms.

VPEE recommend the following for writing alt text:

• Keep it short – just describe the most relevant aspects.
• Mention colour if it’s relevant.
• Include keywords appropriately for improved SEO, if relevant.
• Use proper nouns and names, if relevant.
• Use plain language and spell out acronyms.
• Skip writing ‘photo of’ etc.

Read more

• UCL Accessibility on Social Media Guidelines

3. Colour contrast / Avoid using colour alone to convey meaning

Colour is a powerful way to communicate and we’re not saying you should avoid using it, but make sure that colour alone is not used to convey meaning. For example, if you use ‘traffic lights’ or ‘Green and Red’ for stop and go, make sure the words ‘Stop’ and ‘Go’ are also included.

If you are using colours other than black and white, check the colour contrast. UCL provides guidance when using the brand colours. There are several tools for checking contrast freely available online.

Read more

• UCL Colour Palette
• Contrast checker tool from Web Accessibility in Mind.

4. Videos and recordings

When creating videos or recordings, you should consider alternative ways for people to engage with the content. Does it have clear audio and captions so that people can follow along?

This could also help people who aren’t able to play the audio or similarly are listening to a recording while doing something else.

Several programmes now have automatic captions. As anyone with an accent can attest these are not always accurate, but they are definitely getting better all the time. If you are uploading a recording, I would recommend checking over the captions just in case.

Read more

• 5 reasons why you should caption your video content (UCL VPEE)
• Lecturecast and other multimedia (UCL Digital Accessibility)
• Present with real-time, automatic captions or subtitles in PowerPoint (Microsoft Help pages)
• Use live captions in Microsoft Teams meetings (Microsoft Help pages)

5. Avoid PDFs or at least make sure they are accessible

PDFs are not great in terms of accessibility. Screen readers cannot always read them and unlike most webpages they are not responsive, meaning users may struggle to read smaller text. I would encourage you to think carefully about whether you need to create a PDF. Often a web page or Word document will be more suitable for your purposes.

If you do need to create a PDF, then make sure it’s accessible. The easiest way to do this is to turn an accessible MS document into a PDF (making sure to check the ‘Document structure tags for accessibility’ option first).

It can be difficult to make a PDF accessible after this. You can add tags using tools like Adobe Acrobat Pro, but the more visual and complex the design, the harder this is to do. One solution is to share alternative file formats. UCL have done this on their strategy pages, providing a ‘glossy’ PDF and a plain text Word document of the same item.

Read more

• PDF documents (ISD guidance)
• Create accessible PDFs (Microsoft Help Pages)
• Creating accessible PDFs (Adobe Help pages). This is more advanced.
• Why GOV.UK content should be published in HTML and not PDF. An interesting blog post from the Government Digital Service outlining why PDFs are not great.

What support is available to staff and students at UCL?

• Digital Accessibility Services
• UCL Digital Champions Network
• UCL Library Services – Accessibility

Thanks to Paula Dale and Jonathan Fowles for contributing to this list. Please also check our social media accounts for related posts using #GAAD. 

We have just completed a project to convert the Bain Graffy Film Collection metadata from a set of HTML pages on the SSEES website to MARC records on Alma and Explore. This means that the collection can now be searched alongside the other library materials and handled in much the same way as other video records.

What is the Bain Graffy Film Collection?

The Bain Graffy Film Collection consists of approximately 14,500 films on around 11,000 DVDs, Blu-ray discs, recorded discs, and VHS videos at SSEES Library. The collection was created, added to, described, and indexed for many years by Professor Julian Graffy and Cameron Bain, after whom the collection is named. Cameron Bain sadly died in 2014 but Julian Graffy still submits detailed records to the project.

Converting the Metadata

Professor Graffy submits records in Word format. For many years these were converted by Library staff, largely by Vladimir Smith Mesa, to static HTML pages, one for each physical item. While consistent, easily readable, and well indexed by separate index pages, these did not conform to a formal metadata schema or file format.

With the old server needing to be replaced it was decided to try to move the many web pages to some kind of database. We tried several methods including a web form, conversion to an Excel spreadsheet using python, and lastly conversion to MARC records using Marcedit software. Marcedit is commonly used in libraries- including UCL- for editing large numbers of records in bulk, especially ebook records, but is also capable of converting non-MARC data to MARC and performing powerful textual transformations.

The eventual process involved obtaining HTML and Word documents from Gill Long; each HTML file contained data for one physical item with one or more films on it. I then combined these files in Word so there were one hundred per file and passed these Vlad. Vlad did two important things to the Word documents: firstly, he made sure that every film- rather than each video or DVD- could have its own record on Alma; second, he marked up each element by prefixing the necessary line with a label, such as “Director: “. By explicitly marking up data, this made it much easier for any script to “read” the file and what each part of it meant. For example, it is much clearer in the second example what the title is without having to rely on it being formatted a certain way.

Example original HTML file	Example Word file edited by Vlad
Call number: DVD-2000 STOLPER, Aleksandr Dni i nochi [Days and Nights] Mosfil´m, 1944; released 28 August 1945 Screenplay: Konstantin Simonov, from his story of the same name Photography: Evgenii Andrikanis Production design: Morits Umanskii, Sergei Voronkov Music: Nikolai Kriukov	Call number: DVD-2000 Director: STOLPER, Aleksandr Title: Dni i nochi [Days and Nights] Production: Mosfil´m, 1944; released 28 August 1945 Date: 1945 Screenplay: Konstantin Simonov, from his story of the same name Photography: Evgenii Andrikanis Production design: Morits Umanskii, Sergei Voronkov Music: Nikolai Kriukov

I then converted the word documents to a basic format Marcedit could read (.mrk) then used a number of transformations (essentially, fancy cut-and-pastes) to change the labels to MARC fields. In other cases, I could just use the formatting where it was consistent (e.g. a number followed by “ minutes” is obviously a running time which can be fed into a 300 field, and anything in square brackets in the title form a translated title that can be moved into a 246 field).

The initial MARC file in Marcedit

The record imported into Alma.

=LDR  01604ngm a2200445 i 4500 =008  010121s1945####||#|||############vlxx##d =035  \\$aDVD-2000 =245  00$aDni i nochi =246  33$aDays and Nights =264  \1$c1945 =300  \\$a1 videodisc (87 min.) ; $c 4 3/4 in. =500  \\$aFrom his story of the same name. =500  \\$aOriginally released in 1945. =546  \\$a =546  \\$aIn Russian without subtitles =590  \\$auclbaingraffy uclbaingraffydvd20002099 mrcbaingraffy20221130l =700  1\$aAndrikanis, Evgenii,$edirector of photography. =700  1\$aSimonov, Konstantin,$escreenwriter. =700  1\$aStolper, Aleksandr,$efilm director

The records were converted to proper MARC format (.mrc) so they could be imported into Alma, which created holdings and item data at the same time. Importing them into Alma automatically makes them available in Explore:

The Get It section invites students and staff to contact SSEES Library where they will be able to view materials on-site. They are not currently borrowable.

The indexes created by Julian Graffy and Cameron Bain have been continued and are still really useful for finding films by country of origin and by genre. These web pages have been converted by Chris Carrington on Drupal and now point at the Alma record instead of the individual web entries. They will be maintained by Gill Long using data supplied by Julian Graffy.

Searching for Bain Graffy Items

Bain Graffy items can be found in several ways. In Explore, include the tag “uclbaingraffy” in the initial search to only search items from the collection. This is the search offered from the collection’s home page. You can also use the Collection facet to narrow down to the Bain Graffy Film Collection.

The home page also contains the indexes created by Professor Graffy where users can browse lists of films by genre, country of origin, and date of production. The results link to the records on Explore.

Next Steps

The collection is still being added to and making sure the flow of data is maintained to Explore and the indexes is the most important activity. Due to the quick and partly automated way the data was imported, there is some tidying work to be done, which Vlad has already made a good start on. We hope also to make some improvements to take advantage of the more standardised data format, such as implementing authority control, adding coded language information, or genre headings.