LibGuides Standards and Best Practices

Make your guides accessible
Making your guides accessible ensures that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the internet, as well as contribute to it.  It is essential we make our guides accessible to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities.

• Use alt-text to describe photos and videos.  LibGuides has a place for this when you add images and media.  This is for screen readers.  Screen readers are software applications that enable people with visual impairments to use a computer through a text to speech feature, or by translating text into braille.  Including alt-text enables a screen reader to read a description of your images to it's users. This text also has benefits for search engines, which use these metadata when they generate search results for images.

• Include link information below the link.  Don’t show the information in a “hover” option, this is unreadable to screen readers.

• Caption videos.  This is required for accessibility for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Captioning also increases comprehension, especially if English is someone's second language.
  • ​YouTube offers an automatic caption service, unfortunately it is not always accurate.  Here are several instructions for how to create your own YouTube captions:
    • ​Add your own subtitles and closed captions to YouTube videos
    • Edit or remove captions
    • Upload your own or edited captions to a video
    • Review, edit or unpublish automatic captions

• ​Avoid relying on color to convey meaning. (i.e. green for good, red for bad.)  Colorblind users may not be able to see the color difference and interpret your signal.

Make your guides and pages discoverable

• Use natural language. Use the same type of language your users use for keyword searches.

• Assign appropriate subjects and tags to your guide.

• Create friendly URLs. A friendly URL is a web address that is easy to read and describes the content in your guide.  For instance: 

This makes it so patrons can remember how to access your guide later without having to go through the library website, and also increases the chance of your guide showing up on search engines.