THE INTEGRATED ACCESSIBLE LIBRARY: BUILDING A NATIONAL ACCESSIBLE LIBRARY SERVICE.
David Johnson, Column Editor
THE INTEGRATED ACCESSIBLE LIBRARY:BUILDING A NATIONAL ACCESSIBLE LIBRARY SERVICE.
Peter Brophy
"EASI Access to Library Automation," a regular feature of Library Hi Tech News, examines new technology, information sources and services, and other news of interest to librarians concerned with providing quality services to their patrons with disabilities. EASI (Equal Access to Software and Information), in affiliation with the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE), is concerned with new and emerging technologies for computer users with disabilities.
Introduction
Readers of this column will be familiar with many of the accessibility issues of electronic information resources. In the increasingly visual environments of intranets and the Internet itself, there is a danger that people who are blind or have visual impairments will miss out. Visual elements in Web pages are increasingly used not just for decorative effect but to impart information they are an essential part of the content. As this trend develops, far from extending access to the information poor, the new media could effectively exclude significant sections of the population from participation. Librarians, who have traditionally championed policies of inclusion (well, at least most have!), need to be at the forefront of efforts to ensure that exclusion does not happen by neglect. Multimedia may offer exciting new opportunities to many, but to those who cannot access one particular medium they are the worst kind of dead end, offering frustration instead of access.
In the UK, libraries are rapidly developing a whole range of new electronic information services. The Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, has provided an enormous boost to these developments[1]. Its products include experiments with electronic journals[2], highly successful subject gateways[3], document delivery systems[4] and a wide range of awareness raising and training activities[5]. In its latest phase, eLib is focussing attention on "hybrid libraries"[6],"clumps"[7], and digital preservation[8]. Not surprisingly, most of these experiments and services now rely on Web interfaces, as do the OPACs of the libraries which use and promote them. How accessible are these interfaces?
Are Library Web Sites Accessible?
A research project carried out by the Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM)at the Manchester Metropolitan University has been examining this question. All the UK academic library and service Web sites were surveyed, and a sample subjected to analysis, using a combination of automated techniques[9] and human volunteers (including volunteers with visual impairments).
Of 134 university (and other higher education institution) library home pages that were examined, 49(37 percent) were found to be accessible enough to qualify for the "Bobby Approved" icon. Excellent examples were found at the University of Central England[10], Edinburgh University[11], Leicester University[12] and Cheltenham and Gloucester College[13]. On the downside, many other sites created real accessibility problems. A few examples were:
Lack of alternative text (by far the most common problem), and especially the use of image files to display text;
Inappropriate alternative text (one site described a photograph of the library with the alt text "ircty.jpg" clearly the use of text alts for accessibility had not been understood);
Failure to use null ALT tags where images were only used for "decorative"purposes;
Use of "click here" links (instead of placing the link in the description);
Lack of contact name and address (to enable users to point out accessibility problems);
Use of revolving banners without "freeze" or other alternatives;
Lack of no-frames alternatives, and frames without titles;
Use of tables to achieve visual effects and to display text in columns;
Poor contrast between text and background;
Use of images as wallpaper; and
Use of small font sizes and serif fonts.
The last three issues are concerned with accessibility for people who are not blind, but have a degree of visual impairment. Many sites are so cluttered (occasionally with accessibility symbols and the like!) that even sighted users have difficulty interpreting them. When combined with poor contrast, watermarked images or very small font sizes, the difficulties for people with a visual impairment are compounded.
What about Service Providers?
Similar findings came from investigations of the major service providers' Web pages, although none had serious accessibility problems. A particular complaint, however, especially from the volunteers, was that sites often failed to give text descriptions of their acronyms: COPAC[14], NISS[15] and BUBL[16] all fail to tell the visitor what their acronyms mean a point that might well be an issue for sighted users, too. A further issue concerns the way in which sites set up for information retrieval return their result sets. A search on one of the services,for example, was displayed with lines of text describing simply bullet points,interpreted in audio by the screen reader as "link bullet, link bullet, link bullet ...". The volunteer was convinced that the software had become stuck in a loop and was about to press escape when it finally reached the data and started to read them!
The REVIEL Project
The project that undertook these studies, which were finished at the end of March 1999[17], was called REVIEL (Resources for Visually Impaired Users of the Electronic Library). REVIEL was set up to try to create a blueprint for accessible library services on a nationalscale. Its principles, set out nearly three years ago, were:
"inclusiveness, equity and independence: visually impaired persons should be included as full users of services through appropriate policies and design; they should have equity of access both to services in general and to information services in particular;they should be able to access and use services independently, without additional intermediaries[18]".
The Project has drawn on two, until now almost separate, strands of work: the development of accessibility of information objects, and the design of the digital, electronic,or "hybrid" library of the future. REVIEL has suggested that what is needed is a blueprint for accessible services which draws on all the elements of work of these two strands. Thus:
"There are two possible approaches to the design of accessible library services. The first concentrates on providing tools (such as voice output) and encouraging the use of good practice (such as providing explanations of images in accompanying text) to enable people with a visual impairment to access information from "standard"information sources, even where they use visual images. The second approach is to take the standard sources and "translate" them into accessible formats,before delivering them to the user akin to the translation of printed text into Braille or Moon in the traditional library context. At the same time,both "traditional" and electronic resources will be needed for many years to come if libraries are to offer access to a full range of resources. It follows that, almost certainly, it is the combination of all these approaches that will provide the most comprehensive accessible library service in the future, and the one which preserves an essential element of choice for the user[19]".
There is, of course, a wealth of research into the accessibility of information "objects". The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has recently issued its draft Guidelines on Accessibility as a "Proposed Recommendation", based on earlier Working Drafts[20] and many of the commercial vendors (Microsoft, Apple, and others)have demonstrated a level of commitment to achieving accessibility. The library community has perhaps been less active. For example, there is still no standard way of describing the accessibility format of Braille materials in MARC. Nor does Dublin Core provide a suitable mechanism. It may be that once XML becomes widely implemented it will provide the necessary mechanism for electronic information objects, but this will occur only if there is community agreement on standards. Again, although great progress is being made with digital audio through the DAISY consortium[21], librarians have not yet explored the integration of this new medium into the networked information worlds they are creating.
UK Library Services
Analysis of the actual services provided to blind and visually impaired staff and students in UK higher education demonstrated that in virtually every case effective services had only been developed by creating small, specialist units dedicated to this task, with their own dedicated (in both senses of the word) staff. Unfortunately, this approach has severe drawbacks. First, it is highly unlikely that every institution can be persuaded to make the necessary investment, so gross inequalities of service provision will persist. Second, small units are poorly placed to exploit new developments (unless they are themselves research and development organisations, in which case there will inevitably be a clash of missions once service demands grow). Third, specialist units are in one sense an admission of defeat: they resolve the problem for those with the most severe problems or those who shout the loudest or, perhaps, those who are lucky to be told about and introduced to the service. But at a time when lifelong learning for all is seen as the future, when adults will return again and again to university to study, specialist units simply cannot be expected to cope. In the UK it is estimated that 2 percent of the population has some kind of visual impairment[22]. If extrapolated across higher education the implication is that every institution has a significant number of such staff and students the typical British university with, say, 20,000 members would be serving 400 who were blind or visually impaired.
And, of course, this is only the case of higher education. Accessibility of information is, by definition, essential to full participation in the Information Society. Public,government, health, commercial and every other type of library is affected in the same way. This is why REVIEL is urging a national initiative to make accessibility the norm in the UK.
A National Accessible Library Service
The REVIEL Project has suggested that in order to create a National Accessible Library Service (or NALS), what is needed is the development of the following elements, building on what already exists but with explicit coordination from the highest level and using a firmly cross-sectoral approach:
1.A National Coordinating Agency with responsibilities for:
Policy development.
The development of an agreed minimum service standard for all agencies providing "library" services to blind and visually impaired people which should include every university and public library in the country.
Coordination with cognate national lifelong learning initiatives (such as the National Grid for Learning (NGfL)[23] and "New Library: the People's Network"[24]).
Coordination of training, again setting national standards.
Agreement on metadata standards for accessible formats, within international conventions.
Promotion of accessible Web (and other) design standards.
Operation of a "kite-mark" scheme for accessible library services which meet the minimum standard.
Collection of appropriate statistics on demand for, provision of and supply of accessible library services.
Representation and coordination internationally.
2.A Resource Databank Hub, offering services including:
A growing stock of materials in traditional formats (such as Braille and Moon).
Delivery capability for all formats.
A stock of, together with access to, significant electronic materials for which permission to use is available, including resource delivery capability.
A catalogue of its holdings, with Z39.50 capability.
Coordination of collection descriptions.
A specialist Web-based gate-way identifying quality-assured resources,linked to the National Resource Discovery Network Centre (NRDC) services[25].
Maintenance of a user authentication and user profiling system.
Agreements with delivery agencies.
Digitisation expertise (capability could be outsourced).
Access to copyright clearance expertise, including the development of blanket permission agreements with publishers (probably through an arrangement with the Higher Education Resources On-Demand (HERON) service[26]).
3.A Technical Advisory Centre with responsibility for:
Ensuring that latest advances are disseminated (especially with regard to content accessibility).
Monitoring standards.
Technical advice to Delivery Agencies.
A programme of research and development tightly focused on achieving accessibility within the hybrid (traditional + electronic) library environment.
4.A series of clusters of Delivery Agencies, which could be:
Geographical, involving public, academic libraries and other centres.
Domain, including, for instance, commercial organisations and academic institutions, each offering services to blind and visually-impaired users which meet or exceed national standards.
Conclusion
This model would, of course, draw on all the existing providers and would require government-level support for its achievement. Indeed, it is crucial to the success of attempts to create accessible services that we move away from purely local initiatives towards strategies which include all services. This implies that all librarians need to take the issue of accessibility on board as a professional issue, and not as an optional extra. We have suggested, for example, that professional library and information science courses should ensure that these issues are covered, so that new entrants to the profession are fully conversant with them. With the widespread adoption of continuing professional development, and the beginnings of a discussion on making demonstration of continued competence compulsory, it may be that mechanisms can also be found to ensure that every existing member of the profession is fully conversant with accessible technologies and techniques. Then the NALS will be a large step closer to reality.
Notes
[2]For example,Electronic Law Journals: http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/
[3]For example, the engineering subject gateway, EEVL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk/
[4]For example,SEREN: http://seren.newi.ac.uk/user/seren/
[5]For example,Netskills: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/
[6]For example, the Hybrid Library of the Future project (HyLiFe): http://www.unn.ac.uk/~xcu2/hylife/
[7]For example,RIDING (a gateway to university libraries in Yorkshire): http://www.shef.ac.uk/~riding/
[8]The main work is taking place in the CEDARS (CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives) Project: http://www.curl.ac.uk/decarsinfo.shtml/
[9]The main automated tool used was Bobby, described at http://www.cast.org/bobby/
[10]http://www.uce.ac.uk/aboutuce/services/is.htm#library
[11]http://www.ed.ac.uk/edinfo/LIBRARIES/LIBRARIES_MENU.html
[12]http://www.le.ac.uk/library/li.html
[13]http://www.chelt.ac.uk/lis/
[14]http://www.copac.ac.uk/copac/
[16] http://bubl.ac.uk/
[17]The Final Report of the REVIEL Project was published in May 1999: details can be obtained either from CERLIM's web page (http://www.mmu.ac.uk/h-ss/cerlim/)or by email enquiry to cerlim@mmu.ac.uk
[18]. This text is taken from the original Project Proposal document.
[19]Taken from the draft Final Report of the REVIEL Project.
[20]The Proposed Recommendation was open for comment until 21st April 1999 at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
[21]The DAISY standard is available at http://www.daisy.org/technology/daisy2spec.html
[22]Approximately 1 million people, based on figures provided by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (http://www.rnib.org.uk/). Almost as many people again have difficulty reading standard print.
[23]Department for Education and Employment, Connecting the Learning Society: National Grid for Learning, The Government's Consultation Paper, DfEE, London, 1997
[24]Library and Information Commission, New Library: The People's Network, Library and Information Commission, London, 1997.
[25]The UK's Resource Discovery Network Centre is being set up on behalf of JISC by a consortium consisting of the UK Office for Library & Information Networking(UKOLN), King's College London and the University of Hull. For information on this development see the UKOLN Web site at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
[26]HERON is a new,national service which is developing excellent relationships with representatives of rights holders in order to secure agreements on the copying of electronic texts within the UK higher education sector: see http://www.stir.ac.uk/infoserv/heron/project.htm/
Peter Brophyis Director, Centre for Research in Library & Information Management,Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK. E-mail to: p.brophy@mmu.ac.uk
David Johnsonis an Abstractor/Information Specialist at the National Rehabilitation Information Center (NARIC). Readers with questions, comments, or suggestions may e-mail him at jdivad@aol.com
