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[NOTE: This is a technical writing sample created by Jeffery Oliver as an employee of the College of Arts and Sciences at Boise State. As such, links to resources have been intentionally removed.]

Good News and ScholarWorks for CV’s and publications

This email is to notify department chairs and web admins that if they have not received an inventory of documents and/or videos to remediate, they most likely do not have significant work to complete to be in compliance. Also, to ask that faculty use ScholarWorks to upload CV’s and publications as the single source that everyone can point to for their biographical and publication information.

  • SEND DATE: Wednesday, May 3, 2023

  • TO: Department Chairs, Admins and Web Admins

  • FROM: jefferyoliver@boisestate.edu

  • SUBJECT: Web Accessibility Initiative - Good news and ScholarWorks for CV’s and publications

Email Body

Chairs and Web Admins,

I have good news for many of you today in our series on creating and maintaining accessible content—if you have not received an inventory of documents and videos to remediate for accessibility from OIT, you likely do not have a lot of work in this area to be in compliance with university web standards.

In a meeting last week, Shad Jessen, Director of Web Strategy in OIT, said that his team has sent inventories to site admins with the most work to do toward remediating documents and videos. I’m checking in with folks who received inventories but if you’re particularly concerned, please reply to this email and I’ll get with you and your team next.

A pattern emerges: CVs

Shad mentioned that the most common occurrence of non-accessible PDF content is faculty CVs. OIT’s recommendation is for faculty to upload their CVs to Boise State’s ScholarWorks platform and then we can link to the ScholarWorks profile from faculty directories on our websites.

This model is especially useful in our increasingly transdisciplinary culture in COAS. Rather than duplicate biographical and publishing information across several sites, we can point people to a ScholarWorks profile where website visitors can see everything in one place.

This recommendation has several benefits. First, it’s an easy way to make your public website accessible. And it also gives faculty full control over the publishing of their CVs. 

When faculty want to make updates, they can immediately publish the most recent version of their CV (no waiting on someone else to publish for them). Then, on our public websites, we can link from any page to a faculty’s ScholarWorks profile so that folks can see their CV, presentations, articles, books…everything all at once, and faculty have full control of the content presented.

Next step in the accessibility initiative

The next step in the website review is to evaluate actual website content for accessibility. Largely this will be to make sure that images have “good” alt text and that page content is organized using proper headings: H2, H3, H4, etc. Part of this is making sure that if you’re using panels that these include titles.

For image ALT text, I found these fantastic guides with real examples on how to create good alt text:

  • Cooper Hewitt

  • Washington University

These include examples on how to create ALT text for artworks too which I’m using to update some online galleries on the School of the Arts and Blue Galleries websites.

How are you feeling?

I’ve been copied on the inventories from OIT and I haven’t seen anything that totally scared me (but I’ve been making accessible content for a while).

For those who have received inventory documents, how do you feel about where you are?

I’m making my way around the college but if you have immediate questions or concerns, please let me know—I’m happy to help you and your team develop a plan to make this as easy as possible.

If you have any questions about ScholarWorks, they have a great FAQ page and you can contact scholarworks@boisestate.edu.

Thanks so much for your time,

Jeff O.

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Web accessibility initiative resources

Here are some resources about this current initiative as well as practical steps for remediating common accessibility issues.

  • Federal Voluntary Resolution Agreement Regarding Digital Accessibility - This notice was posted to the Web Guide website and sent to web administrators on Nov. 30, 2022.

  • Web Content Accessibility Checklists on the Boise State Web Guide - These checklists are great for quick reference on how to best develop content on our sites considering structure, text, images, tables, graphs, links, video, audio, PDFs and more.

  • Our Responsibilities as Website Owners at Boise State - This page describes our various roles toward maintaining websites that provide the best experience for all people.

  • Review Published PDFs in Monsido at Boise State - This document describes how to use our web accessibility tool Monsido to find PDFs.

  • Accessible Infographics via Boise State Web Guide - This page describes the best ways to make content in infographics accessible to everyone.