How you can improve internet accessibility in your library

The internet may have been around for decades, but there are still millions of people in the UK who are excluded from using it. Part of this problem is making web pages highly accessible. You or your library members may have found web fonts to be too small or do you have difficulty with reading long paragraphs. The good news is that JISC and the University of Southampton have developed an excellent solution to help you get round these problems. It’s called the the JISC Techdis Toolbar – but perhaps the best news is that it’s free.

There are lots of accessibility toolbars available, all of which have different features and benefits. Here’s what the University of Southampton aimed to achieve:

The concept behind JISC Techdis Toolbar is simple: One toolbar to provide all of the functionality you would usually get in many different products, and which will run in any desktop web browser.

The end result is an impressive feature set that many libraries may find useful.

• Text size: increase or decrease the size of text. If text resizing makes the site unreadable you may wish to use your browser zoom feature to increase both the image and the text sizes.
• Font: allows you to choose a different type of font for the text and increase line spacing.
• Spell Check: while writing in a plain text form, suggestions are shown below the text-area after a pause. Disable the checker by selecting the button once more. Note that this may not work with rich-text editors that already have spell checkers.
• Dictionary: highlight a word in the web page and a definition from Wiktionary will appear.
• Text-to-speech: choose whether you want the whole page read out loud, or just the highlighted text. And yes, you can highlight a portion of text before selecting the Text-to-Speech button to have only that text read out. Wait for that section to finish before highlighting a new section of text. Note that large pages, such as Facebook pages, may require you to select smaller portions of text at a time.
• Referencing support: automatically scan the page for referencing information – it will collect as much as it can linked to authorship, dates, title of the page, name of the website and the URL. Once you have selected the green tick you can highlight the text and copy it into any notepad or word processor.
• Colour customisation: Alter the colour of the JISC Techdis Toolbar toolbar, change the web page colours – background, text and links or choose pre-made page styles. Some web page colour changes also impact on the toolbar.

How to get started

• Watch a short introduction video about the toolbar and it’s features.
• Read download and installation instructions for the toolbar
• More information about JISC Techdis