Browsing by Subject "Accessibility"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Accessibility assessment of the Midwest Chapter of MLA
    (2024-10-11) Pionke, JJ; Biszaha, Anna; Chrisagis, Ximena; DeCaro, Jessica; Feldman, Jennifer; Natal, Gerald; Regan, Matt; Gilbert Redman, Jessica D.; Shannon, Carol; Stumpff, Julia C.; Westall, Sara
    In 2023, JJ Pionke became the President of the Midwest Chapter of the Medical Library Association. He determined that for his presidential year, he would form a task force to determine the accessibility of the Chapter and remediate accessibility issues as appropriate. Case Presentation: To accomplish the accessibility audit of the organization, Pionke formed an Accessibility Task Force that was time limited to one year. Task force meetings were held once a month to keep people accountable and to share out progress and requests for assistance. The task force was broken up into four teams: annual meeting, policy, social media, and website. Task force members could be on more than one team. The goals of each team were generally the same: what are other organizations doing, what do we have already if anything, and develop best practices/policy/etc. as needed. Conclusions: The teams fulfilled their mandate by creating best practices/guidelines/policies documents. Some accessibility remediation was needed for the chapter website. The task force’s findings and materials were shared out among the Chapter as well as passed on to other Chapters, many of whom had expressed interest in our results.
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    Keeping Users in the Dark: The Design and Implementation of a Dark Mode for a University Library Website
    (2022-05-25) Maixner, Gary; Smith, Andy
    Dark modes of websites have become a popular feature for users in recent years. While the option to create a contrast mode has existed for decades at the system level, what we are seeing now are designs not only focused on accessibility, but also usability. Library personnel at the Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis University Library took it upon themselves to follow this trend and begin the design, development, and implementation of a dark mode version of the library’s website. This involved some trial and error in the initial prototype, taking feedback from users, and then writing the new stylesheet.
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    Not open for all: accessibility of open textbooks
    (Ubiquity Press, 2021) Azadbakht, Elena; Schultz, Teresa; Arellano, Jennifer; Library and Information Science, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
    In order for open educational resources (OERs) to be truly open to all, they must be accessible to learners with disabilities, including those with visual, auditory, physical and cognitive disabilities. This study sought to determine the accessibility of a randomly selected sample of 355 open textbooks using a custom rubric based upon the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C’s) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), version 2.1, primarily at the Levels A and AA. Included books fell into one of four format types: HTML files/websites, PDFs, Microsoft Word documents and EPUBs. The average number of ‘fails’ – instances in which they ran afoul of a rubric category – across the whole sample was 5.93 and the median was 6, out of a total of 14 or 15 categories, depending on the format type. Overall, most of the books did not meet basic accessibility requirements, such as including alternative text for any images, properly coding/tagging any tables and following a logical heading order structure.
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    Pilot Testing and Validation of an Educational Game on Transportation Challenges for Mobility Device Users
    (MDPI, 2024) Candiotti, Jorge L.; Park, Sangmi; Lee, Chang Dae; Rafferty, Evan J.; Cooper, Rosemarie; Cooper, Rory A.; Occupational Therapy, School of Health and Human Sciences
    Despite the increasing use of assistive mobility devices, practical education to navigate real-world ground transportation barriers is lacking. The educational board game, called HERL-Town, was developed to teach safe and effective navigation for mobility device users (MDUs) in the community. The study examined the initial validity, reliability, and overall quality of HERL-Town as an educational tool for overcoming transportation barriers in real-world environments. HERL-Town featured fifty scenarios focused on transportation barriers and strategies, which were assessed for content validity, while the game quality was evaluated using the Model for the Evaluation of Educational Games (MEEGA+) tool. Twenty-three experienced MDUs and four caregivers participated in the study. The results indicated a good quality score of 60.15 and forty-five scenarios met the content validity standards. The overall reliability of the scenarios was moderate (ICC = 0.729). Early psychometric findings suggest HERL-Town as a promising effective educational game for helping new MDUs and their travel companions navigate safe and effective ground transportation barriers, hence enhancing their confidence, independence, and participation in the community.
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    Universal Design for Learning: Interactive Handout
    (2023-05-03) Santamaría Graff, Cristina; Price, Jeremy F.; Waechter-Versaw, Amy
    This is an interactive handout created by CEISL team members for the purpose of introducing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in higher education settings as a means to promote equitable, inclusive, and accessible pedagogy for community college courses and programs.
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    Usability and Vibration Analysis of a Low-Profile Automatic Powered Wheelchair to Motor Vehicle Docking System
    (MDPI, 2023) Lee, Chang Dae; Daveler, Brandon J.; Candiotti, Jorge L.; Cooper, Rosemarie; Sivakanthan, Sivashankar; Deepak, Nikitha; Grindle, Garrett G.; Cooper, Rory A.
    The QLX is a low-profile automatic powered wheelchair docking system (WDS) prototype developed to improve the securement and discomfort of wheelchair users when riding in vehicles. The study evaluates the whole-body vibration effects between the proposed QLX and another WDS (4-point tiedown system) following ISO 2631-1 standards and a systematic usability evaluation. Whole-body vibration analysis was evaluated in wheelchairs using both WDS to dock in a vehicle while riding on real-world surfaces. Also, participants rated the usability of each WDS while driving a wheelchair and while riding in a vehicle in driving tasks. Both WDSs showed similar vibration results within the vibration health-risk margins; but shock values below health-risk margins. Fifteen powered wheelchair users reported low task load demand to operate both WDS; but better performance to dock in vehicles with the QLX (p = 0.03). Also, the QLX showed better usability (p < 0.01), less discomfort (p’s < 0.05), and greater security compared to the 4-point tiedown while riding in a vehicle (p’s < 0.05). Study findings indicate that both WDS maintain low shock exposure for wheelchair users while riding vehicles, but a better performance overall to operate the QLX compared to the 4-point tiedown system; hence enhancing user’s autonomy to dock in vehicles independently.
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    Using Social Media Websites to Support Scenario-Based Design of Assistive Technology
    (2020-01) Yu, Xing; Brady, Erin; Palakal, Mathew; Bolchini, Davide; Chakraborty, Sunandan; Hasan, Mohammad
    Having representative users, who have the targeted disability, in accessibility studies is vital to the validity of research findings. Although it is a widely accepted tenet in the HCI community, many barriers and difficulties make it very resource-demanding for accessibility researchers to recruit representative users. As a result, researchers recruit non-representative users, who do not have the targeted disability, instead of representative users in accessibility studies. Although such an approach has been widely justified, evidence showed that findings derived from non-representative users could be biased and even misleading. To address this problem, researchers have come up with different solutions such as building pools of users to recruit from. But still, the data is not widely available and needs a lot of effort and resource to build and maintain. On the other hand, online social media websites have become popular in the last decade. Many online communities have emerged that allow online users to discuss health-related subjects, exchange useful information, or provide emotional support. A large amount of data accumulated in such online communities have gained attention from researchers in the healthcare domain. And many researches have been done based on data from social media websites to better understand health problems to improve the wellbeing of people. Despite the increasing popularity, the value of data from social media websites for accessibility research remains untapped. Hence, my work aims to create methods that could extract valuable information from data collected on social media websites for accessibility practitioners to support their design process. First, I investigate methods that enable researchers to effectively collect representative data from social media websites. More specifically, I look into machine learning approaches that could allow researchers to automatically identify online users who have disabilities (representative users). Second, I investigate methods that could extract useful information from user-generated free-text using techniques drawn from the information extraction domain. Last, I explore how such information should be visualized and presented for designers to support the scenario-based design process in accessibility studies.