Events

This webinar will provide an opportunity to share how accessibility was foundational to the development of the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries' new website, which launched in late 2022. The MSU team is committed to creating an accessible, inclusive, and responsive web presence for the MSU Libraries. They will share their design processes and tools used to develop an accessible and sustainable website. These processes involved constantly engaging with the members from Libraries’ Accessibility Working Group and the Libraries’ Accessibility Coordinator on a bi-weekly basis to demonstrate, receive feedback, and get guidance on the accessibility questions that came up during development.

The MSU team will discuss the process of automating accessibility testing using Cypress.io, an open source end-to-end testing framework used in conjunction with cypress-axe to automate the accessibility checks. This webinar will elaborate on the usage of such tools, similar open-source software, and their incorporation into their development process. They will share their experience in setting up these tools in addition to their usage and their pitfalls in working towards making the MSU Libraries' new website accessible to a wide range of audiences.

Libraries are meant for everyone. While libraries have long claimed this to be true, exclusionary practices and inaccessible systems still exist and are extremely difficult to fully eradicate. The act of methodically creating a culture of accessibility hinges on each member of an organization as they seek to ask constructive questions and make decisions that pull the organization in a unified direction. In an attempt to infuse accessibility into the culture at the University of Virginia Library, the library used a collaborative process to establish and adopt a system of four design principles. If exclusionary practices and inaccessible systems can be designed, we can learn to recognize them, so they can be redesigned. Using these design principles as organizational values to guide conversations can mean less time establishing a shared understanding of the problems at hand, and thus lead to more focused, effective, and inclusive solutions. This process seeks to help empower individuals and departments to act in ways in which they can engage in real change. Through this webinar, participants will learn more about the concept of design principles, including how they can be useful in cultivating intentionally accessible environments, and will come away with tools for beginning these conversations at their own institutions. 

Open Educational Resources (OER) are meant to be as open and available as possible, but if they’re not accessible or on accessible platforms, how “open” are they really? In this webinar, staff from the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries will share how they’ve integrated accessibility into their OER initiatives and OER grant program to improve the accessibility of OER created at MSU. In order to hopefully implement similar OER accessibility processes at their libraries, attendees can expect to learn about OER accessibility resources, MSU Libraries’ OER accessibility checklist & grant program accessibility requirements, MSU Libraries’ staff who work on OER accessibility, MSU Libraries’ OER accessibility evaluation workflow & procedures, specific OER accessibility challenges/issues and OER accessibility tips and lessons learned.

Participants will expand their awareness of disability, learn to promote accessibility, and consider how to contribute to a positive climate through their beliefs, behaviors, and communications.

This webinar will provide real-world case studies of the formation and impact of accessibility committees at two different university libraries. Presenters from the University of Minnesota and the University of Washington will offer the respective stories of their committees’ formation and advocacy efforts, in addition to discussing the successes, challenges, and horizons facing these kinds of working groups in academic libraries. The session will provide participants insight into how the experiences of the presenters can be applied at their own institutions and how the two groups have scoped and implemented accessibility projects within their unique organizational cultures.

This webinar will provide an overview of the work being done as part of the Federated Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education (FRAME) grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Bringing together grant participants from libraries and disability services, the webinar will demonstrate the Education Materials Made Accessible (EMMA) database, the workflows for both libraries and disability services, and what the future of EMMA could look like.

This webinar walks through process of a high-level e-resource accessibility review from Michigan State University's Usability/Accessibility Research and Consulting.

Learn the language of web accessibility and how to apply and use it in your library websites and evaluations of e-resources. This webinar will provide a high-level look at what makes a website accessible, some of the common challenges we face working with library databases, and how the Library Accessibility Alliance and its database testing program can help librarians advocate for more compliant resources.

This webinar is includes clips from Jay Dolmage's 2019 Keynote for the Big Ten Academic Alliance and a facilitated discussion regarding how libraries can be more aware and responsive to the needs of persons with disabilities when using physical library spaces.

This webinar will walk the audience through what is disability and how it is defined.  The session is interactive.  In this session you will learn about why disability laws are important, what libraries should think about in terms of their own accessibility for people with disabilities, and how compliance and accessibility are fundamentally different concepts.