Good news, the ALA Midwinter website now has ALT tags for all of their image-based navigation. Thanks to Stephanie Hoerner for making the changes necessary to make this page accessible. Apparently the two emails that I sent asking about this were never received but someone read about my comments on this site and dropped a note to someone who could fix the problem.
Tag: ala
email != domain name and other gaffes
You know how there are people who like to act like they know what they’re talking about, but sometimes don’t really know what they are talking about? This happens with technology issues a lot. I have students who will report to me “And then I clicked on the Microsoft and the Internet turned off and I got an error saying ‘Can not find it’ but then it started to go again.” They sincerely believe they are communicating their tech support issues to me, but to my ear they are speaking gibberish. I can usually untangle the meaning with a few well-placed questions however. This is also the case with the ALA press release hyping the 2006 election and the electronic voting procedure they are forever refining. I am concerned that neither the person who wrote this press release, nor anyone else who read it before it was sent out and posted on the web site, knows the difference between an email address and a domain name.
ALA Annual will be in New Orleans
This just in: The ALA 2006 Annual Conference will be held in New Orleans as scheduled from June 22-June 28.
why do librarians pay librarians so little?
Michael McGrorty’s blog post with some advance discussion about an article he wrote with Thomas Hennen appearing in American Libraries in October. I’ll jump to the conclusion for a pullquote, but you should read the whole thing. “[A]t the finest public library system in the nation, the starting salary, adjusted for cost of living, comes out to $12,833. That is simply a crime, and one that should be addressed by two parties: the management of the enterprise, and the leadership of the American Library Association”
Accessibility in books, websites, libraries and your mind.
I have been reading a lot of books about accessible design lately. This started around the time that I got sent this story about the National Library for the Blind in Norway and some of the design flaws that make it very hard for the visually disabled to get into, much less use. The Vermont Technical College has a lot of these books on access. Sadly, I am one of the only people to have checked them out in the last decade. As an aside, I think at this point I would have a very hard time going back to a library where they didn’t have datestamps in the back of the book. I think libraries keeping circulation info “secret” — not on purpose, but by ILS system design — is a decline in information-sharing with patrons, and a shame. Here are the books I have read, with links to my reviews.
Beautiful Barrier Free
Access by Design
Design for Dignity: Studies in Accessibility
And, of course, let’s remember how to make our web sites accessible. Jacob Nielsen has come out with lists of top ten web design mistakes as well as top ten weblog design mistakes. Check to see if you make any of these mistakes. I recently wrote a note to ALA’s webmaster commenting on the lack of ALT or title tags on the ALA Midwinter Meeting page. It’s a nice looking page, but information is imparted through lots of graphics, with no alternate navigation. Usually there is a set of text links at the bottom of the page if they use images for navigation. This is what someone viewing the page with a text-only browser would see. I cannot stress enough: this is the conference information page for the largest library association in the world. If we can’t follow our own rules about accessibility, how can we expect others to?