Month: April 2022

Accessibility Online and In The Classroom: Opt-In?

Accessibility in the digital world is becoming increasingly visible, especially on social media platforms. Instagram users with large followings have been including an image description in their captions, and Twitter has a feature to opt-in to create alt text for pictures. This is an incredibly important feature, and I believe rather than opting in a user should have to opt out instead. Methods of accommodation need to be built into the digital world and be intuitive to access. As these practices become more common, the Internet transforms into a more usable and accessible tool.

Image Description: This is a screenshot of the alt text option from Twitter. The top of the screen reads ‘Write alt text,” and the picture uploaded is of a black cat being held by a man. The bottom of the screen requests that the user describes the photo of the cat.

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative is a digital resource centered on making the Internet more accessible for people with disabilities. THE W3C offers a free Digital Accessibility Foundations course customized to the needs of the user, such as website design, coding, or advocating for accessibility. (Digital Accessibility Foundations Free Online Course) The website within itself offers more information on what web accessibility is and different tools related to web accessibility standards. These standards are divided by different components that engage with each other: web content, user agents, and authoring tools. (Accessibility Principles)

The Web Accessibility Initiative emphasizes how accessibility on the Internet benefits everyone. The following is reinforced through the strategies shared on this website: “The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. When the Web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability.” (Introduction to Web Accessibility )

The Web Accessibility Initiative website models the principles it advocates for. For content-heavy pages, such as “Accessibility Principles,” information is divided into clear subheadings. There are two buttons at the bottom of the menu, where the user can either go ahead and expand all sections or collapse them. This makes the website’s navigation easier, especially on a mobile device.

Image Description: This is a screenshot from the Web Accessibility Initiative website. At the bottom of the screen, the options to expand text sections or collapse them is visible.

Examples of different accessibility features are described under Tools and Techniques. Some features are more familiar than others, such as captions and audio descriptions. There are other features I had not considered before diving into this website, including easy-to-read text (summaries for passages of text) or word prediction, which I had never before recognized as an example of assistive technology.

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed technology use in the classroom. While I was completing my clinical internship in 2020, I had to sign up for my students to use the class set of laptops about a month in advance; this same school district is now one-to-one, meaning all students are provided with a laptop. The Web Accessibility Initiative will be central to ensuring my digital classroom will be accessible to all of my students. I already have accommodations built into certain aspects of my lessons and materials, such as using captions and transcripts for videos and podcasts. The practice of proactively including academic and technological strategies for accommodation while planning a class is known as universal design. (Academic Accommodations for Students with Learning Disabilities) I have a similar mindset when it comes to both accessibility in the classroom and on the web: accommodation tools and technologies should not be accessed by opting-in, as they should be the default.

Crowdsourcing Project Review: “What’s On The Menu?”

Food history interests even people who didn’t relish history class. Who doesn’t like food? The New York Public Library has an ongoing digital collection of restaurant menus ranging from the 1840s to today, titled “What’s on the menu?” This project explores different restaurants throughout the years, what they served, and the cost of food. It encompasses both economic and cultural histories throughout the decades and is of interest to historians, chefs, and a broader audience as well. It was launched as a digital crowdsourcing project in 2011, and the project of collecting these menus began in 1900.

As of March 2022, there are a total of 17,500 menus uploaded to the database. Menus are organized by decade, and there is a database of every individual dish as well as how many menus they appear on. There are no new menus uploaded, however, there is plenty that needs a second pair of eyes for review. I can’t speak for the ease of the original process of transcribing the menus, however, for reviewing these menus it is a matter of going through the items previously tagged and either approving their transcription or making a quick edit. Transcriptions focus on the name of the dish as well as the price. Anyone can edit these menu transcriptions without creating an account on the website, which was a purposeful choice by NYPL Labs to keep this project accessible. Menus that need to be reviewed can be accessed from the launch page, though there isn’t a search engine to find specific menus.

I reviewed the menu for Savoy Grill, which was dated from the year 1959. It was simple enough to review the transcriptions made by another user, though I found marking the review as completed was a bit more challenging as the link was not as prominent compared to others on the website. The entire review process for this menu took less than an hour. I can see how it would take longer for an individual who created the first transcription for a menu, as each item has to be tagged and labeled. To tag an item, it is as easy as clicking on where it is within the image to add the dish name and price. This requires some precision, or when you go to enter the information the text itself may not be fully visible while you type. Users can indicate if the text was not fully readable in their edit as well.

This is the uploaded menu for Savoy Grill. The green checkmarks indicate where items have been tagged and transcribed.

Overall, this project was easy to navigate and complete. The website design appears to be slightly outdated, however this likely makes it more accessible to older generations contributing to this project. The data is accessible for public use, and downloadable spreadsheets are updated twice a month to reflect the full collection. Looking at menus from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century is fascinating, and from the vast number of contributors, other people must feel similarly and found this website to be accessible as well. “What’s on the menu?” provides a positive example of a digital crowdsourcing project.

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