D4D Accessibility Guide

Deque's: The Beginner's Guide to Accessibility

Consider Updating Your Guide's Navigation Layout

Tabs appear on the side rather than the top. Subpages and even headings can be displayed as nested tabs. The page content will be in a single column, vs. multiple columns. 

• Side navigation and a single column format improves mobile experience.
• Navigating guides with lots of tabs and sub-pages is much easier on all devices. 
• Gets rid of dropdown/hover-over actions for accessing subpages. Dropdowns can be small targets to click and can overlap with other tabs when on smaller screens making it too easy to hit the wrong link.

How to change the layout

Your organization may have specific organizational branding and a style guide so discuss with your system administrators before you change your guide's layout.

If you change your layout from multicolumn to single column, the content display order will put whatever was at the top of your left most column first, then work down, then to the middle and down, and finally to the right and down.

• From the author view in your guide select the Guide Layout button > the Guide Navigation Layout > Side Navigation - default
• If you make this change on a system level have developer/admin support you can also . Making this change in advance means you won’t have to go back and review that all the content is where you want it.

Work with Your System Admins and Developers (if you have them)

• Do as much as you can to accessibility accessibility at the system level as you can before you ask authors to get into the content work.
• Custom CSS, templates, and a review and understanding of your system settings. The LibGuides product is trying to do a lot of things so there are lots of features that present accessibility opportunities and frustrations.
• Decide before hand how your project team wants to keep a record of technical questions and issues that come up. The more you can centralize that especially if working across departments, the better

Line-up Some Accessibility Champions in Advance

• Recruit some authors who are power users who you can test out your trainings and resources and give you feedback, and maybe help you train others or answer questions
• Recruit and train people who are interested in accessibility so they are able to help checking the remediation work, it will take you longer than you think. These reviewers don't need to be LibGuides users.
• Accessibility work is skill building, it's valuable and something they can add to a resume.