Michelle Eichelberger: Great welcome, thank you for joining me today for this discussion of lip guides accessibility, best practices, I just wanted to start out by saying that this is a topic that's very close to my heart, I have done tons and tons of live guides cleanup at various places where i've worked.
Michelle Eichelberger: the beauty of live guides is that anyone can use it it's really pretty user friendly and easy to add content.
Michelle Eichelberger: The drawback to that is that it's hard to keep all of the people who are adding the content trained and aware of accessibility issues, so it really needs ongoing maintenance, as you go forward.
Michelle Eichelberger: So we're going to talk about some of the specific things that is good to bear in mind as you're adding content or updating content, so let me go ahead and get my slides going over here.
Michelle Eichelberger: So we're going to talk about links and content and styling and we'll also take a few minutes to talk about a service that sls can offer you if you don't have any kind of.
Michelle Eichelberger: Accessibility checker on your campus many people have this already, and maybe you've been working with your it department to make sure that your pages are up to date and using the most current styling that's needed for accessibility, but.
Michelle Eichelberger: If not, that is something that we can help you with.
Michelle Eichelberger: So the first thing I wanted to talk about today are links and you know they're not really considered traditional accessibility topics, but it's sort of baseline accessibility, if your links don't work people get get to your stuff so your stuff is inaccessible.
Michelle Eichelberger: When you're adding content to live guide, you can certainly you know, use the rich text box for everything, but I would recommend that you try not to do that as much as possible.
Michelle Eichelberger: Lip guides include some tools that are super handy for like checking linking or other things.
Michelle Eichelberger: But they can't check links that are in text so you know if you're using a rich text box you add some stuff you add some links.
Michelle Eichelberger: If it's in that body of the rich text that doesn't say that it's a link to live guides so what the link checker does it's under tools.
Michelle Eichelberger: Is it checks things that are formatted as links and what I mean we can go out and poke around and live guides at the end of this session but.
Michelle Eichelberger: What I mean is there's an option to add a link as your you know when you go into add content it'll say average tax dead link and whatever, so I would really recommend that you do add link as much as possible.
Michelle Eichelberger: The other benefit to doing, that is, if this is a link that you commonly use you're going to reuse it a bunch of places like.
Michelle Eichelberger: The first thing that comes to mind is the old dollar.
Michelle Eichelberger: catalog you know if you wanted that thing you're going to be linking it all over if you use it as a link, you can reuse it, meaning that then in the future if that link changes, you can change it in one place and it'll populate out to all the places it's been reused.
Michelle Eichelberger: So, best practices are use the Ad link, you can use this link checker again it's under tools and lead guides.
Michelle Eichelberger: You might have to have admin access to be able to go in there mess around with it, I can't remember off the top of my head, but.
Michelle Eichelberger: Will you may get on this list, this is a little snippet from the list of the links that it found on our site that were out of date or needed to be fixed.
Michelle Eichelberger: If you sometimes you get false positives on that list, and so there is a way you can add the link to the exclusions list so that's something to keep in mind as well.
Michelle Eichelberger: So, other things, to think about with links, and this is a little more traditionally accessibility minded, and these are things if you.
Michelle Eichelberger: Do training and accessibility, these are recommendations that you'll probably see.
Michelle Eichelberger: So one of the things is it's best practice to have the link open in the same window, because if it's a pop up window sometimes that's hard for people who are using a screen.
Michelle Eichelberger: reader or have mobility issues to kind of navigate to that new pop up or figure out what's going on, whereas the old content.
Michelle Eichelberger: The lip guides default is to open a new window, so there may not be much you can do about that, but just you know if you have the choice, make the link open in the same window window, then people can use the back and forward commands to move around, through the content.
Michelle Eichelberger: um.
Michelle Eichelberger: i'm seeing a message that.
Michelle Eichelberger: Can people hear me speaking i'm seeing a message from somebody that they're not hearing audio.
Michelle Eichelberger: So if I can just do a sound check.
Jen Parker: yeah I can.
Yvonne Kester (she/they): awesome.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay, thanks, so much so we'll keep going then and, hopefully, they can figure out the sound issue on their end.
Michelle Eichelberger: So back to linking again, you know blue guys default is to open a new window, so you know, there may be a way in the code underneath that you could tell it not to do that, but.
Michelle Eichelberger: You may just want to live with it, but if you have the option open it up in the same one one of the things to keep in mind is, if you use.
Michelle Eichelberger: A name of a link and just call it more or you know click here for more info that kind of thing that's not super helpful to somebody who's using a screen reader so trying to make your links descriptive you know don't.
Michelle Eichelberger: And if you can avoid using the URL itself is the link that's really helpful too, because the screen reader is going to try and read that whole URL as the link name, which is just going to sound like garbled garbage to people.
Michelle Eichelberger: In live guides there's sometimes that you there's nothing you can do about this like if you have a long description for something, and you have to put it in the overflow cuz you have a limited number of characters in the like.
Michelle Eichelberger: The you know what you see on the screen it automatically goes to more the other place you'll see this more link is on your Librarians page and lip guides.
Michelle Eichelberger: will be like more info about this person or whatever so there's you know there's not a ton you can do about that, but I guess the recommendation would be to try to keep your description as lean as possible.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know, not just for this more issue but also just you know, try and keep your wording to be as succinct as you possibly can, when you're doing web design and web development.
Okay.
Michelle Eichelberger: So I mentioned that there is that link checker tool there's also a thing that you can use and live guides which is super powerful and also therefore super dangerous.
Michelle Eichelberger: But I do use this quite a bit just to see what's going on mice my site.
Michelle Eichelberger: So the search and replace is also really handy because you know I mentioned, with the link checker that is only checking things formatted as links, you know with that add link option.
Michelle Eichelberger: But this will search everything, this will search in the text of a rich text box so it's a good way to find out if you have links hanging out out there, that you don't even know about, or that might need to be changed um let's see here.
Michelle Eichelberger: There is.
Michelle Eichelberger: Nancy is here comment about confusing to open in the same window I just changed our default to new window yeah I mean mileage may vary.
Michelle Eichelberger: But in general recommendations are to open in the same just again because of the functionality of somebody who's got it then like click around and might have mobility issues.
Michelle Eichelberger: So search and replace back to this topic, this is a good way you know if you're looking to see if you have content, maybe that's got an outdated.
Michelle Eichelberger: URL that you might need to update it to https you can do a search and check for everything on your site that has this.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know, you may be pointing to a site that hasn't upgraded to the more secure https yet, but it's worth taking a look out there to see what you've got that might not be up to date.
Michelle Eichelberger: And this search and replace it's an it's like the find and replace in word or any kind of Microsoft, you can just do a simple search you don't have to replace right away, so I would highly recommend.
Michelle Eichelberger: doing a search and What it does is it'll show you all the places that it's found so you can go right to the assets, you can go right to the guide and kind of look around see what's there.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then manually fix it if you want to do that if you have something that you know for sure you have to find and replace and it's you know, a really limited number of things you'd be fixing you can certainly do the replace, but again it's hard to undo make a widespread change.
Michelle Eichelberger: One of the things we sometimes see kind of lurking around still and again it's.
Michelle Eichelberger: Especially because it's in like rich text it's not being found by the link checker is old links to the olive catalog that you might.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know, you might have like tried really hard to find them everywhere, they are, but this is something you could use the search and replace to look for so here's you know duchess's old.
Michelle Eichelberger: Sunni connect all of catalog link you could do a search for that and then replace it with the new Primo URL so that is the way that you can use that.
Michelle Eichelberger: search type categories takes me getting used to, I completely agree with you, can you really have to kind of play around it's like what am I searching and searching the title i'm a searching guide.
Michelle Eichelberger: So that does take some practice but, again, as long as you're not like hitting the search replace you can play around with it as much as you like to try and get the right results that you're looking for.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay.
Michelle Eichelberger: Any questions about links before we move forward to content, this is really great that this discussion is going on in the chat i'm glad you guys are interested and have things to talk about with each other.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay well why don't we go ahead and start talking about content.
Michelle Eichelberger: As I mentioned, with that more link, you know the overflow link for a really long description trying to keep your pages a reasonable length, so that people don't have to do a lot of scrolling to find the information that they need.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know kind of web design basics are to use simple language try not to use a ton of acronyms.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know there's i'm sure you're all aware of library jargon that to us is just second nature, but to a brand new user might be really confusing so in general, try to keep things clear.
Michelle Eichelberger: Try to keep your pages as concise as you can while still giving enough information I understand that's a fine line sometimes.
Michelle Eichelberger: and think about how the the content will look on a page what's Nice is that the native live guys environment is designed to be responsive and when I say responsive What I mean is that.
Michelle Eichelberger: The look of it will change as your size of your screen changes, and that is a really good thing you want your content to do that.
Michelle Eichelberger: So you know you can you don't have to look at it on a cell phone to get that experience you can actually mess, with the size of your browser and you can watch it changing so in this case, you know, these were.
Michelle Eichelberger: On a large screen these tabs went across the page, but when you go, you know when you shrink down the browser it will make them line up differently so.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know, as you're adding content to a page it's always a good idea to kind of go and mess, with the size of the page and see how it looks.
Michelle Eichelberger: Copying and pasting, this is a huge issue and it's so easy to do that most people don't think about what's going on, when they're actually doing this, and this can cause a lot of problems for screen readers.
Michelle Eichelberger: And it can do weird things with your spelling it can bring in code from the site where you're copying it from, and you, it looks fine on the page so there's no way you would know this so.
Michelle Eichelberger: I really recommend trying to do you know, a clean copy and paste as much as you can that can be a little challenging because if you're copying, something that has links, if you just do it like a.
Michelle Eichelberger: Control V to paste it it's going to remove those links, so you don't want to do that, but on the other hand, you really want to check look at the source code and see what's in there to make sure that you haven't introduced some weird stuff with you're copying and pasting.
Michelle Eichelberger: If you don't care about links, or if you don't have any kind of functionality like that that you would lose by doing you know just a really clean paste in there, you can do.
Michelle Eichelberger: And I think I said control alt be then gets control shift to be.
Michelle Eichelberger: You can do that to paste without formatting or you can also paste the content into notepad and then copy it from there, and when I say clean content What I mean is there's no.
Michelle Eichelberger: Special font coding there's no special color coding there's no special sizing you really want your user to have a.
Michelle Eichelberger: Similar experience on all of the pages on your site you don't want the font to be changing from page to page or the size of things or.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know you want it to be sort of a consistent professional looking site, so the more you pay attention to what you're pasting the better your chances of that are going to be.
Michelle Eichelberger: Because you already have inherent coding, you know inherit format and with your lip guides which you can control, so you really want to use that whenever you can.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay, so i'm going to show you what it looks like if something goes bad with you're copying and pasting and when I talked about viewing the source, if you're in a rich text box there's the source button and you can click on that and see all the stuff underneath, so this is.
Michelle Eichelberger: stuff that I copied from a word document, and you can see, all this crazy stuff that got copied in with it, so you know I just highlighted the thing and word I pasted it into a rich text box it included.
Michelle Eichelberger: margin coding it in included font size coding line height.
Michelle Eichelberger: The family of font which, again, all of this stuff is already set up and live guides and you don't you want to use what's already in there, because you want your pages to look consistent.
Michelle Eichelberger: The there's color for the span style font weight, etc, so you know if I had pasted this into notepad and then copied and pasted it in none of that would be here, I would just have you know the heading one.
Michelle Eichelberger: I don't even know if it would give me a heading one, it might be just be a paragraph code and then the the words and then an end tag so you can tell if there's some weird stuff just by clicking on the source.
Michelle Eichelberger: And my apologies if you don't have a really big background in html or CSS This might be a little confusing but.
Michelle Eichelberger: This is messy if it pays cleanly you'll basically just like see the words that you would be expecting to see.
Michelle Eichelberger: This is like the underlying stuff that's going on.
Michelle Eichelberger: Thank you can remove format oh that's great so looks like a capital T with an x next to it lets up, and here it is right here, so that is super.
Michelle Eichelberger: Good information to know.
Michelle Eichelberger: About, I am very like sometimes I do things really inefficiently, in this case, if I didn't want to lose links, what I would probably do is copy this code.
Michelle Eichelberger: paste it into notepad and do find a replace to like look for and span and then delete all the ends fans and so.
Michelle Eichelberger: that's really helpful information to know about that the other thing I can do it can do is that it can bring in.
Michelle Eichelberger: ids and stuff from other sites that won't be applied in your environment because you don't have any kind of.
Michelle Eichelberger: CSS code that would have this name in it, and that can sometimes be confusing and also cause problems so just you know, be aware of what you're doing take a look at the source code when you paste stuff and just try and keep things as clean as you can.
Michelle Eichelberger: The other weird thing that can happen and sometimes this just happens on its own it's not even because you pasted something is that spaces can be coded as this nb SP.
Michelle Eichelberger: I mean, this is a way that you can make a space using code, but they can show up in the middle of words so here's wolf den so here's instead of just an actual like space it's got this nb SP.
Michelle Eichelberger: And you know, on the display it looks fine like it looks like a space, but if there's something that's trying to.
Michelle Eichelberger: read this like a screen reader it can throw it off because it doesn't like it won't read it correctly, it can.
Michelle Eichelberger: cause spelling errors like when I run that sort site thing it's like this, what is this thing it's got like two letters here and then it's broken up and it's got the rest of the sentence here.
Michelle Eichelberger: The other thing it does is that it can throw out your throw off your line breaks.
Michelle Eichelberger: So if you see something on your page and live guides and you're like, why is this like.
Michelle Eichelberger: Line broken in the middle or not broken, or you know what is going on with this, if you do that source and look at it there's a strong possibility that there might be this thing instead of a space and to fix it you just hit space so that's something to keep in mind.
Michelle Eichelberger: Any questions about copying and pasting before we go on.
Michelle Eichelberger: Alright, so let's talk a little bit about documents.
Michelle Eichelberger: Documents also need to be coded for accessibility and they need to be checked and you need to make sure that they're readable with a screen reader.
Michelle Eichelberger: And it does take some work to do that, you know you really should do that that's really helpful for anyone who needs to access the information that way.
Michelle Eichelberger: A workaround is, if you can find the content on an external site than the people who are maintaining that site, are responsible for the accessibility, you know if you try and use one it is horrible it would be nice to tell them and maybe they can fix it but.
Michelle Eichelberger: At least it's not your responsibility so as much as possible what I would do is link to content on the site where it's natively from the other, you know it's not just like.
Michelle Eichelberger: That just to make it so it's not your responsibility, but it's also you know if that thing gets updated.
Michelle Eichelberger: If there's new information it's not unmuted keep maintaining, that is, and it should really be up to the people who produce this stuff to make all the updates so as much as possible link to the external.
Michelle Eichelberger: Content So you can see, in this case, this is from our be pat repository and this content is online on the web, and this is great, I can just link to it there, I don't have to put it behind a password it's not something they've sent to me that.
Michelle Eichelberger: I don't feel good about sharing around publicly.
Michelle Eichelberger: If it's public already i'm just going to link to it i'll get all the updates that kind of thing, so this may be obvious, but I thought it would be worth mentioning it.
Michelle Eichelberger: The other thing is.
Michelle Eichelberger: it's better you know if you have the option, the less often that you can make patrons open another document, whether it's a word file or an excel file or whatever.
Michelle Eichelberger: The more that you can put this stuff right on the page it's just better design, because then people don't have to go clicking around and looking for things so just bear that in mind as well.
Michelle Eichelberger: Some of the errors that show up when I run the sort site have to do with a dedicated styling which we are going to talk about more in a few minutes.
Michelle Eichelberger: But also media stuff so you know we mentioned, if you have a link that you're trying to use it's really best to use it as a you know add link type in live guides same goes for media, you know if you're putting a widget for a YouTube video or.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know your premium catalog Primo widget whatever it's really best to format that as a widget and there's an option to do add the media object slash widget.
Michelle Eichelberger: And this is really good, because then, if something changes with the way.
Michelle Eichelberger: media content is formatted and you have to go in and do something like add a title, which is something that is recommended, you could find them all in your assets list you don't have to go poking around the whole site.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know if you add them as media you'll know what media stuff you have in there, and that is a useful thing.
Michelle Eichelberger: So, as I mentioned, I frame and frame elements must have a title attribute and what I mean by that is, they need to have in the code this little you need to make sure that they have a title.
Michelle Eichelberger: And I think that is again for screen readers they want to be able to see what the title is for the thing.
Michelle Eichelberger: And when I mentioned dedicated code, this is probably I don't know in the past 1015 years the way that you code things has changed.
Michelle Eichelberger: And there's been a movement to use style, instead of just standalone coding and we'll talk about this a little more.
Michelle Eichelberger: But so you know if you're in there any way fixing things like add title, you might also want to fix any of this outdated styling and instead of height equals 350 you would do.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know in brackets style equals and then height colon.
Michelle Eichelberger: blah blah I haven't linked to the w three schools where it has all kinds of information about styling and what's the best practice and all of that.
Michelle Eichelberger: Because if you haven't done this before it's you may not know what you need to do and how you need to fix it, so we will talk more about that.
Michelle Eichelberger: So you know, like media like links.
Michelle Eichelberger: You need to keep in mind what you're doing with the content that you're adding and.
Michelle Eichelberger: I just lost my train of thought there for a second you actually can add images right in your rich text, but what you want to do is instead of just pasting them in there.
Michelle Eichelberger: Which again could cause some weird code or could give you links to things that might not be able to be kept up to date when you go to add an image.
Michelle Eichelberger: You want to load it on your live guide server and you would, I think, if I scroll back, I think you can see, the little image so here's the image, you know add image icon you would click on that.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then you would go to browse server and then a thing comes up that says, where do you want to put this thing you would pick the folder and then add the image that way.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then, when you are putting it into your rich text document then it's going to give you, you need to put in your alt text all images need to have alt text unless it's a decorative image.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then, all you need to do is just put a space in this box, because the screen reader doesn't need to read that it's a decorative image of.
Michelle Eichelberger: I don't know a picture of your library, or whatever that's not really crucial for the person to understand what's on your page to that just needs a space.
Michelle Eichelberger: But you know, try to be as descriptive, as you can you know within as few number of words, as you can, and you know just do your best you don't have to go crazy with this, we do have, I think I have a link.
Michelle Eichelberger: That w three schools has some good information about alt tags and like how to write a good alt tag.
Michelle Eichelberger: One of the things they say is don't include words like example of or image of or picture I mean that's kind of assumed that it is a picture, so you don't need to include that kind of thing but.
Michelle Eichelberger: Just do your best with it, anything is better than nothing, and again this is wording that would be read by a screen reader.
Michelle Eichelberger: The other thing, while you're in here is, I would make any image able to be used with that responsive design, you know I showed you how if you.
Michelle Eichelberger: scrunch up the screen it changes the way things are laid out if you hard code your image width and height, then that will not respond, you know if you say this thing is definitely always.
Michelle Eichelberger: 950 pixels wide then it's not going to be able to respond as the screen changes side.
Michelle Eichelberger: So what I usually do is I usually just leave the height blank because it is a ratio, you know the height will change as the width changed.
Michelle Eichelberger: changes and then I use a percentage for the width so you know, no matter what size, the screen is I want this thing to take up 95% of the width of it so that's something good to keep in mind so Jackie what is the width percentage respective to.
Michelle Eichelberger: Its percentage of the available space, so you if you have a screen that's 600 pixels wide this is going to be 95% of 600 pixels if you have a screen that's 900 pixels wide it's going to be 95% of its the the width of the thing that you're looking at it on so that's a good question.
Michelle Eichelberger: So this has to do with how much space, do you want this to take up on your page.
Michelle Eichelberger: um let's see what else.
Michelle Eichelberger: There is a way and I don't you know we're not going to get into this deeply at all, but there's a special code, you can use that will know if a person is looking at something on a computer screen, you know, like a regular screen size, whatever like for a.
Michelle Eichelberger: PC or a laptop or something versus a cell phone and then this coating will say hey this person is looking at this on a cell phone or on a small screen.
Michelle Eichelberger: And it would like remove a big header image, or it would know, to use a different kind of image not going to get into that, but that is a possibility, if you have people on staff who know how to do that kind of thing.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay, and then Jackie questions, yes yep so if you've got this inside of a box it's going to be 95% of that box size so and again the box size, because lip guides is responsive just natively.
Michelle Eichelberger: It will change so yeah it's it's 95% or 50% or whatever of wherever it's living and you know try it out, look at it in a couple of different sized browsers and see if you are comfortable with that and, if you like it or not.
Michelle Eichelberger: And you can play around with it.
Michelle Eichelberger: So tables.
Michelle Eichelberger: Traditionally, I mean i've been doing web coatings since the late 90s and back then.
Michelle Eichelberger: The easiest way to lay things out on a page was with the table, you know there there wasn't a lot of information about like using dibs or.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know, doing CSS or that kind of thing so it's like you wanted to spread stuff out of the page you put it on a table you line them up you, you know right justified left justified.
Michelle Eichelberger: That was a really good way to organize things and my suspicion is that a lot of you probably starting using live guides when this was still the best way to.
Michelle Eichelberger: lay out your pages well that's no longer the case tables are really not great for people who are using screen readers just because of the order in which things are read, so the recommendation now is to use dues or other CSS you know just tagging to lay things out rather than a table.
Michelle Eichelberger: So you know use use this more modern layout style wherever possible, but if you have to have a table, and if it is.
Michelle Eichelberger: If it is a table that's being just used for layout it's not a data table where you're like you've done research and you're like you know you have a table that shows.
Michelle Eichelberger: How your stats worked out that kind of thing if it is really just for layout you need to add this role equals presentation to the table and that tells the screen reader that.
Michelle Eichelberger: I think it changes the way that it's read again not going to get real deep into that but there's a lot of information out on the web, that you can find about why you would want to do this, this way that w three schools again that's great.
Michelle Eichelberger: And can really help you train on how to learn how to do this stuff.
Michelle Eichelberger: forums again not going to dive deeply into this, I am still learning about forums myself and like what are best practices to get forms to work when we run the sort site it'll tell you that something's wrong with your form.
Michelle Eichelberger: But it can sometimes be challenging to figure out like well what how do I, what do I need to fix it, the only thing I wanted to really talk about today, besides giving you guys this link to the.
Michelle Eichelberger: w three schools information about forums, is that everything needs a label so sometimes you'll get an error saying hey you're you know you're missing a label for this thing, so this is what the labels look like.
Michelle Eichelberger: style and color.
Michelle Eichelberger: I know it's sometimes tempting to use underlines to you know set up something on a page like okay we're gonna talk about this thing next i'm going to underline it.
Michelle Eichelberger: problem with that is that, then people expect that to be a link so try to avoid using underlines for emphasis, instead of for linking.
Michelle Eichelberger: When you are styling things in live guides if you're selecting the whole word and you miss a letter and then you go back and like style just that letter.
Michelle Eichelberger: That can do weird things with your coding so here's a case where you know the font color is just being applied to this tea and then there's another font style that's being applied to the.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know the rest of the word, and then the beginning of the next word and then My guess is this next one, was to style the rest of that word so just.
Michelle Eichelberger: Just be aware of what you're doing when you're doing it because this can cause again like weird spelling errors or.
Michelle Eichelberger: You can just throw things off a little bit so it's just a tidiness thing more than anything, just you know when you're highlighting something make sure you're catching the whole word in those single highlight.
Michelle Eichelberger: I mentioned the dedicated code, and these are things you know not only using tables for layout but using the B and the end be for bold.
Michelle Eichelberger: I and and then die for a telex align equals border equals self in all this stuff so this stuff is now handled it in the style.
Michelle Eichelberger: tags, instead of just being its own thing and w three schools, has a lot of information about how to correct these things when you run into them.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then we've talked about this in other places just make sure that your your text and background colors have enough contrast, and you can use the way of tool to check that just to make sure that it's easy for people to read on the screen.
Michelle Eichelberger: So any questions, up till now, before I talk a little bit about the service.
Michelle Eichelberger: sure you can ask a question about coding feel free to unmute yourself Nancy if you want to just ask.
Nancy Murillo: Thank you, that easier.
Michelle Eichelberger: yeah yeah.
Nancy Murillo: Oh, I like to use code, a little bit of html to make like the text of a link in put it in bold you know, so it just POPs out a little bit more should I not do that, then.
Michelle Eichelberger: You can do that, what is your concern about using that kind of stuff.
Nancy Murillo: And, and I just saw the word deprecating code, so I thought, do I have to use the.
Michelle Eichelberger: let's go um you know what let's just go take a look and i'll show you what what I mean.
Michelle Eichelberger: You can still code um but you want to use the up to date styling for it, you don't you know, in the old days you could use a B and an end to end to be to make something coded.
Michelle Eichelberger: But now you want to use the the modern styling and if you're using the live guide styling it's.
Michelle Eichelberger: it's going to do it for you, so let me show you what I mean So if I wanted to make something bold in here, I would just highlight it and make sure I highlight the whole thing and click on bold.
Michelle Eichelberger: And when I look at the source, what I should see is this is strong and then and strong and the old days you could use a be.
Michelle Eichelberger: An end be for bold but that's not really you're not supposed to use that anymore, so if I look at this without you can see that it will bold it but that's deprecating you shouldn't be using that kind of coding so when i'm talking about.
Michelle Eichelberger: Fixing that stuff it's basically going through finding all the places where you use this old kind of styling and changing it into the new one.
Michelle Eichelberger: If you're doing it natively in live guides is going to use the right coding it's just there's old stuff you know if your pages have been around for a long time.
Michelle Eichelberger: You might have to fix this and if you, you know if you take advantage of our sort site service it's we're going to help you.
Michelle Eichelberger: identify where there are places like that same thing with the talents you used to be able to code things by using it, if I wanted this to just be a talents, it would be I and then and I.
Michelle Eichelberger: But that's not really how you should be selling things, and there are reasons for this, which I don't have all the information see how that made that Alex, but this is.
Michelle Eichelberger: This code this I, and I is deprecate it shouldn't be used anymore, so that anybody else on the call have any good information about why some of this coding isn't good anymore.
Michelle Eichelberger: So code to your heart's content just do it the right way, and you know or or modify things or whatever.
Michelle Eichelberger: You could probably even do a search on yeah dedicated html tags.
Michelle Eichelberger: So it's something that's disapproved of these are they're allowed but they're not recommended and are being replaced so that's what i'm talking about so it's not that you can't you know code things just you don't want to use the old tags for them.
Michelle Eichelberger: That help Nancy I just confuse you more.
Nancy Murillo: No, it didn't I just think that yeah i'm gonna have to change.
Nancy Murillo: A lot of stuff as.
Michelle Eichelberger: Well, but are you I mean, are you using b&b is that what you're doing and that needs to be fixed right.
Michelle Eichelberger: Yes, okay yeah nope you want to use the modern stuff.
Michelle Eichelberger: And I wish I could give you a better answer why you want to use the modern stuff but.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know, but that's something to that if you, you could use the search and replace and live guides to find bracket be and replace it with brackets strong, you know that would be a way to do it if you could be sure that every place there's a bracket be in there.
Michelle Eichelberger: is something that you want to change so that would be an option for you, rather than having to manually go find them all.
Nancy Murillo: Okay.
Michelle Eichelberger: it's just it's really best to use, you know, use the live guides coding when you're in there, you know if you have something you type something in you want to do something to it if you use the use the tools in the rich text box it's going to coat it correctly, so I talked about the italics.
Michelle Eichelberger: that's now, instead of I it's em.
Michelle Eichelberger: For emphasis and em so you know look guys will do it correctly so let's let them do the work, then you don't have to worry about what you're doing.
Nancy Murillo: But what What about like the title of a link so i'm not talking about this rich text editor and talking about like so the title of a link say I add a link right and the link has an I give it a name.
Michelle Eichelberger: With the Ad link here.
yeah.
Nancy Murillo: And I can't change, I mean if I want to make those words that word in bold.
Michelle Eichelberger: Then you can use strong and strong.
Nancy Murillo: Okay, so.
Michelle Eichelberger: that's what I you know what it is.
Michelle Eichelberger: yeah you don't want to use b&b it's it's not considered good and there's a reason for that I think it's because that that be is used for something else.
Michelle Eichelberger: it's it's there's a reason to do it that way, and the other thing is, I mean if you always want your links to be bold, you can change the code, you know if you have.
Michelle Eichelberger: admin access, you know if you want every link in your system to be a bold link, you can go into the system settings and you can do that it's not right, you would go into look and feel, and you can do custom.
Michelle Eichelberger: CSS you if you could figure out.
Michelle Eichelberger: What the code is for the link you could just tell it to always be bold, rather than an airbnb tell your links.
Nancy Murillo: Okay, thank you.
yeah you're welcome.
Michelle Eichelberger: Any other questions let's see.
Ken Fujiuchi: This is Kevin but.
Ken Fujiuchi: I can just add a little detail and I think J K l kind of mentioned the CSS thing for the stylistic stuff but one of the other things, I think, was the semantic web movement a while back.
Ken Fujiuchi: Where they try to start changing the html code so it's actually like puts it into context the content, so I think strong and emphasis weren't meant to actually bold italicized it's just how the browser interprets it.
Ken Fujiuchi: But it's supposed to be like strong emphasis and then emphasis and so.
Ken Fujiuchi: You can use CSS to you know, change the style, but the idea was more that you know anything in any content in between the strong is like strong emphasis versus emphasis, which is not, as it was, it was like getting two levels of like importance within the text.
Ken Fujiuchi: And you're supposed to think of it more that way, rather than whether it looks nicer is a bold or italics.
Ken Fujiuchi: And a lot of a lot of the deprecating stuff was because of that, I believe, because most of it was aesthetic but now, with more modern day browsers and screen readers you have to actually worry about like what that's going to describe that the Code as not just like a visual thing right.
Michelle Eichelberger: Because there's more underlying code that is being processed in different ways.
Michelle Eichelberger: yeah that's helpful can thank you.
Michelle Eichelberger: All right, I just had one more quick slide about.
The.
Michelle Eichelberger: See here.
Michelle Eichelberger: about the service that we can offer.
whoops.
Michelle Eichelberger: get my thing to come back up okay.
Michelle Eichelberger: So, so, as I said, sort site, I mean your campus may already have kind of like a it's called site checker or something like that.
Michelle Eichelberger: No site improve so you may already have something on campus that your it people can run your content through including your lip guides content, but if you don't have that and if you would like us to run it through it, we would be happy to do that.
Michelle Eichelberger: We would send you errors that were found you know provide you with some help with how to fix them and then you know we can rerun the report a couple of times for you to to help you track improvements and you know show what you fixed.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know, we wouldn't be able to like run it every week for you, for eight months, but we are able to run it a few times.
Michelle Eichelberger: So, and I didn't invite Jacqueline to come from Duchess and I did ask her she'd have you know, give us a little input on how this worked for them, and you know.
Michelle Eichelberger: What they thought of this service, because we did run it with them, so, if you would be willing to talk about that a little bit that would be great.
Michelle Eichelberger: Okay Jacqueline says she's having trouble unmuted so.
Michelle Eichelberger: sorry about that.
Michelle Eichelberger: I guess it, you know if there's anything you wanted to type in the chat you know if you thought this was a worthwhile thing to do, I know, one of the things we had talked about was that it's challenging to.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know it's like well these problems have been identified, how do you fix them so again that w three schools, I found is excellent, to give you information on, you know how to fix it, I mean it's it's challenging to do.
Michelle Eichelberger: A lot of us aren't web developers we don't have a lot of experience, using html or CSS but you know, the more you can figure out, the more you can fix the better it's going to make your pages, for your users, so I would really recommend taking a look at it, oh thanks so much Yvonne.
Michelle Eichelberger: And thanks Jacqueline for putting that information in the chat.
Michelle Eichelberger: And so you know I will post the slides and I put in some links to some training, information, you know the Q university actually has some really good information about how to make your site's more accessible.
Michelle Eichelberger: The I mentioned the wave browser plugin for making sure that your color contrast is working or other kind of basic excel stability things.
Michelle Eichelberger: i'm going to stop sharing my slides okay cool.
Michelle Eichelberger: Great thanks Jacqueline for that input any other questions anything that people want to see or talk about or.
Michelle Eichelberger: anything we can look at together.
Ken Fujiuchi: hi this is Ken.
Ken Fujiuchi: Ken, but do you ever run into issues where it's something in live guides like the navigation or interface.
Michelle Eichelberger: Yes, that.
Ken Fujiuchi: red flags and it's it's part of the code that you can't change because it's usually like part of the template and now part of your content.
Michelle Eichelberger: yeah I don't know that's way to deal with that.
Michelle Eichelberger: I have found that the best way to deal with, that is, to contact them through the support at spring shared calm.
Michelle Eichelberger: they're really pretty responsive I reported something recently, one of the things that pops up all the time is like there's something in the footer that it definitely doesn't like tags there's you know things like that come up or.
Michelle Eichelberger: there's some header code it doesn't like but I found that the people that spring sure, or will respond to you and will tell you, if it's something that they are planning to fix.
Michelle Eichelberger: yeah that's a that's a good question, and when we run the the.
Michelle Eichelberger: The sort site.
Michelle Eichelberger: The program for you, I do identify you know what are things you can fix, what are the things that are just part of the spring share code.
Michelle Eichelberger: What are things sometimes when we reported things to them they've said well you know sort site might be finding this as a problem, but we don't think this is a problem, so we're not going to fix it, but at least you get an answer to those questions.
Michelle Eichelberger: So yeah that definitely can happen.
Ken Fujiuchi: Or, I guess, I should clarify I usually report to spring sure to it was more like because, being part of the Sunni campus sometimes you get flagged.
Ken Fujiuchi: Because your pages is bringing up a flag with you're like yeah it officer I don't know the best way to handle it when you have to wait till spring sure kind of fixes it and you don't really have a timeframe.
Michelle Eichelberger: yeah I don't know that I have any good advice on that, I mean, I guess, I would just report to your it officer hey this is, you know, this is a third party vendor we've reported to them here's their response so you know you're making a good faith effort to fix it.
Michelle Eichelberger: And there's sometimes going to be things that you can't fix.
Ken Fujiuchi: Okay.
Michelle Eichelberger: I know there's and you know in.
Michelle Eichelberger: Live guides spring share is not the only third party vendor that works with colleges, when I was at GCC there's.
Michelle Eichelberger: Sports software that they were using and there were tons of accessibility issues with that, so you know, I think, as far as third party vendors go spring share I found them to be really pretty responsive and I feel like they're trying so at least they'll try and work with you on things.
Michelle Eichelberger: Anything else.
jkl: um I have a quick question just picking everyone's brain as Joel from optometry, by the way.
Michelle Eichelberger: yeah hey Joe.
jkl: hi I sometimes when i'm coming up with all tags for images I have trouble coming up with what to say when it's a in the context of like an instructional type thing when it's like you know step one.
jkl: You know click on the thing that says that and then it's just a screenshot showing that, like because it's like it's just like do I just say exactly what I just said in the text for the alt text on the image like i'm not I never know what to do with those.
Michelle Eichelberger: Well yeah don't even look at our faqs.
jkl: You know when you're trying to explain how to do things in almost same it's like here's a screenshot of where this thing lives on the page and if somebody can't see that image, I mean you could spend.
Michelle Eichelberger: eight paragraphs talking about like okay it's a little to the left at the top, and so I don't have a good answer for that, but I would love it if somebody else has a good answer that is a really challenging thing.
jkl: You know, even just hearing that it's challenging for other people helps me because I was like Why do other people handle it like is it just me.
Michelle Eichelberger: Know it's hard, I mean, and then you think about if somebody who has you know.
Michelle Eichelberger: A visual impairment, is trying to work in all my I just I don't even know how you would do that, I think that it would be really hard and that kind of speaks to, we need to make stuff more accessible for people but but yeah that is a challenge.
Michelle Eichelberger: Anybody have any ideas for Joe.
jkl: Am I just like looking at a bunch of people's websites and see see if I see something that looks really good and then.
Yvonne Kester (she/they): I always just.
Yvonne Kester (she/they): Say that it's a screenshot showing the interface and reiterate that all of the instructions are step by step in words.
Yvonne Kester (she/they): To that if something to that effect and make it make it short.
Yvonne Kester (she/they): Because I mean really what you're doing is you're giving a visual to.
Yvonne Kester (she/they): People of vision um and it's really not very useful to a person who doesn't who has low or no vision.
jkl: Right that's kind of what I was thinking, I felt like I was like almost going in circles are working backwards it's like well this wouldn't be helpful, you know, based on hopefully the screen reader giving the instructions, would be the one.
jkl: You know.
Yvonne Kester (she/they): But yeah.
jkl: But yeah Thank you.
Michelle Eichelberger: Anything else anybody wants to look at.
Michelle Eichelberger: You know, when I was talking about the the Ad link that you really want to add your links as links as much as possible that's here, and then the media widget same kind of thing.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then, if you wanted to add an image.
Michelle Eichelberger: You would click on the image icon and then browse server and then you could upload.
An image.
Michelle Eichelberger: So i'm not going to do that, but that's the best way to add images.
Michelle Eichelberger: Oh, thank you amanda that's helpful for the decorative.
Michelle Eichelberger: images.
Michelle Eichelberger: I would say to that some of this is kind of a moving target.
Michelle Eichelberger: So it can be challenging to keep up with what are what is best practices in the field for these kinds of things so i'd you know don't kill yourself just do your best and any changes, you make to improve things as an improvement for somebody.
Michelle Eichelberger: Great well, thank you guys so much for joining me today, this was a really good discussion about these kinds of things and I will post the recording and the slides once I get them from zoom so have a great rest of your day thanks everybody.