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UBC LibGuides: Guidelines

Guidelines and best practices for the creation and management of guides at UBC Library

Accessibility Best Practices

Text and Navigation

  1. Use a descriptive and informative title on each guide, while ensuring titles are distinct between guides
  2. Help information should placed in a consistent location on all guides (see Contact Info on Guides for guidelines)
  3. Structure content using H3 and H4 headings to convey a hierarchy of information on the page
  4. Use the built-in list tool (bullets or numbers) rather than making your own list
  5. Align text to the left
  6. Use bold or italics for emphasis (rather than colour)
  7. Provide less information in meaningfully labelled sections
    • Use of H5 and H6 headings is discouraged as it means there is too much content on your page for best practices in web writing
  8. Do not use colour to communicate meaning or design elements
  9. Do not use the built-in option to create a dropdown box in the navigation menu

Tables, Graphics & Links

  1. Use tables for data, not for layout and use a table header so that it has a contextual title
  2. Use alternative text for images unless a caption replaces the alt-text. View the W3C Alt-Text Decision Tree for more detail
  3. Include the file format and size in the file name. Example: Archives_worksheet_PDF_4_MB.pdf
  4. Only override links opening in the current window for acceptable reasons from the W3C standards
  5. Use a video embedding service (YouTube, Vimeo) that include free captioning or provide captioning and/or a descriptive transcript

Accessibility Settings

The LibGuide platform has a number of built in accessibility settings that we are using at UBC Library. These include:

  • Restricting access to level H1 and H2 headings to facilitate screen reader use. Read More from Springshare
  • Use of the UBC colours (referred to as branding or common look and feel (CLF)) ensures web compliant colour contrast. Read More from Springshare
  • Default URL behaviour is for links to open in the same window (not a new window)
  • Default font size in guides is set to 14px, Arial font, and automatically adjusts based on device size and display settings

Learn More About Accessibility in LibGuides