Accessibility

We are informed by the philosophy that accessibility for all people is essential and rooted in the core mission of libraries to provide access to information. Following accessibility guidelines improves usability for everyone.

CollectionBuilder strives to evaluate and continuously improve structure, markup, design, and documentation to positively impact access for all users, on all devices, and to enable preservation for future users.

To do this, we carry out accessibility audits as part of our regular design and development process, using Lighthouse and other accessibility and performance audit services to assess our templates in an ongoing manner. The relative simplicity of CollectionBuilder’s static web approach and semantic markup lends itself to accessibility features builtin to HTML and the ability to quickly improve issues.

If you encounter any issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

This section is a work in progress. We hope to learn from others and welcome contributions of all kinds, from an email to a pull request.

Creating Accessible Collections

The content, objects, metadata, and configuration you add to CollectionBuilder templates will impact the accessibility of the resulting website. The template provides unique options such as “image_alt_text” and “object_transcript” to flexibily adapt collection metadata for maximum useability. CollectionBuilder Docs aim to provide tips for creators in each relevant section to help make informed choices.

We are committed to ongoing improvement of this documentation and we hope to create tutorials and further resources for auditing your own site.

Software and Platforms

A variety of platforms and tools are part of the typical process of creating a CollectionBuilder project. The accessibility of related platforms impacts users. Here are resources for the main platforms:

Please keep in mind that none of these platforms are requirements for using CollectionBuilder. The templates and projects themselves are plain text files that could be edited with a variety of tools suited to your needs and workflows. If you have tips and suggestions, please share with the community!

Third-party Libraries

CollectionBuilder templates use several libraries for adding features, functionality, and styles (found in “assets/lib” folder). Issues and limitations in these projects may also impact CollectionBuilder sites. We strive to follow best practices and guidelines using these libraries. Here are some resources related to those components:

Resources

Here are some accessibility resources relevant to library websites that we use as guides for our development: