#8: Check the cataloger's work on non-English materials →

From Emma:

This tip was, unfortunately, directly inspired by the Spanish media collection at one of the Dallas Public Library branches where I used to work. To make shelving easier, the DVD labels the system uses have the first letter of the title printed on the top edge of the spine. Despite the title of the original tip, I don’t want to blame our acquisitions people for what I’m about to complain about, because I suspect we get them pre-processed by Midwest Tape, the vendor where we buy our DVDs. For English-language movies, titles like The Princess Bride or The Pirates of the Caribbean come with the letter P on the label, but I noticed while shelving the Spanish DVDs that there were suspiciously large sections of Es and Ls (“el,” “la,” “los,” or “las” being the Spanish words for “the,” depending on the gender and number of the noun). Sure enough, “El laberinto del fauno” was under E instead of L, and “La buena vida” was under L instead of B.

My first thought was to see if I could run some kind of list in our ILS (library catalog software) that would capture everything with this problem, but I couldn’t think of a good way. I am confident that MARC records contain the full title of an item and also have a field for something like a ‘filing title’ that omits initial articles. Theoretically, then, you could pull those, compare them, and generate a list of non-matches that probably needed relabeling, but as a non-cataloger who got her degree in the newfangled lazy modern days of library science education, there is too much I don’t know about bibliographic records to efficiently pull those out.

Fortunately (for this specific purpose, not in general), our collection at that branch was small enough that I just brought a cart out, removed the Es and Ls, and changed all the labels that needed to be changed via the simple expedient of printing out the correct first letters from a Word document, cutting them out, and taping them over the label that the vendor sent us. Of course some of the collection was checked out at the time, so I had to keep an eye on the area over the next couple of months and do a few rounds of follow-up, but it wasn’t bad. Just like my efforts to change the language of the labels for non-English collections, this mainly came down to a tedious but important craft project.

Overall, this was an easy fix to implement and did not require much specialized knowledge or skill. It might have been a good project to give a helpful volunteer if your library had such a person available.

I’m fortunate to speak the dominant non-English language in my area, and I realize this would be harder if you didn’t, but it’s probably still doable. Even if you are working with a language that doesn’t use a Roman alphabet normally, if you are in a predominantly English-speaking country your ILS will probably be English-based and thus use MARC records with romanized transliterations/approximations of any ‘foreign’ text. Those records could be your starting point for working out what is being used for “the” and how that is reflected on the shelf.

I would really love to hear from someone who has looked into this with a language other than Spanish. Please make a submission if you’re out there and you have the time!

#7: Do a non-visual sign check →

From Emma:

I recently moved to a new branch of the Dallas Public Library system, so I checked out all our room signs as part of getting to know my new building and preparing for a meeting with our Facilities department. I am fortunate to have an excellent, hardworking team who have the respect of the community, take good care of the collection, and maintain a heavy program schedule, so it looks like one of my major areas of focus as branch manager is going to be on our building, which is older and could use some attention and investment if it’s going to meet the community’s needs as well as the staff and collection are meeting them. The building was built in the 1980s, so a lot of the accessibility features that are more common in newer libraries aren’t likely to have been on the radar of the designers at the time.

My building has basically 10 doors of significance that a patron might want to know the labels of: two public restrooms (men’s and women’s), a conference room, a program room, the main exit/entrance doors, and three emergency exits from public areas. There is also a door from the staff area to the public area, but it’s behind the desk where patrons won’t be walking, and a janitorial closet that opens onto the public floor as well as into the staff area.

I checked all these doors (except one of the emergency exits, which I am realizing as I write this—better go back) and only the program room has braille on the sign. I know that a donation from a community organization enabled us to get that room, so I bet that the sign was purchased at a different time, possibly from a different budget, than the rest of the room signs.

Rather than ask for the remaining signs by sending a single list asking our administration to purchase all nine, I thought I would see if I could do some more thinking and research to help me prioritize what we need. In a perfect world of course we’d buy everything we need right away, but I’m a new manager, I know my system’s budget isn’t infinite, and I want to make sure that both literal capital and political capital are left for other accessibility-related needs if it does turn out to be the case that administration can’t or won’t get everything we ask for.

The big trade-off that I came up against in trying to do this was frequency of use versus safety. I suspect that most patrons would be much more likely to need the conference room and restrooms than the emergency exits, but the consequences of not being able to easily identify the emergency exits on the rare occasions that they are needed are obviously more severe than having to ask someone which door is the one for the women’s bathroom. I went on an online forum for people who are blind or otherwise visually-impaired and asked for advice about what made libraries easy or difficult to use, and room signage wasn’t high on the list as far as what people said was important, so I think I’m going to minimize our investment in this by asking for braille signs for every door I can think of where we could order something pre-made, cheap, and widely available, and where a person would probably be going by themselves. Accordingly, I am asking for “women’s restroom,” “men’s restroom,” “staff only” (for the janitorial closet), and three “emergency exit” signs. I think “conference room” might not be as widely available, and I think the main entry/exit doors are probably relatively obvious to someone with limited or no vision, since they feel and sound different from the other doors and are the only double exterior doors.

If anyone knows more about this than I do, I’d be grateful for input!

#6: Your single-user restroom is probably underused →

From Emma:

I thought of this tip by seeing it in action. It’s a good example of how a headache-inducing change in the library can have unexpected good outcomes. When I worked at the Downtown Lansing branch of the Capital Area District Library in Michigan, the public elevator in our old building was increasingly unreliable but the library put off working on it because it was by far the easiest way for patrons who couldn’t do stairs to get to the upstairs half of the collection and to the main bathrooms and the program room in the basement.

The only bathroom on the ground floor of the library was a single-user restroom in the children’s area that had to be unlocked by staff if someone needed to use it. The reason for that was quite clever, actually: it was intended to be used as a children’s restroom and kids don’t tend to be good about locking doors behind them, so having an automatically-locking door protected them from being walked in on. Because of that setup, we’d always treated that as the “kid’s bathroom” and directed adult patrons to one of the other bathrooms in the building. Once the elevator was down, we had a lot of patrons with limited mobility asking to use that restroom, and our head librarian took down the “Family Restroom” sign and altered the policy to “anyone who asks can use this bathroom.” It was great for people who had limited mobility or people who might not be comfortable using a shared bathroom to all of a sudden have this option, but the fact that you had to ask for it to be unlocked left enough of a barrier that people who could easily use one of the other ones rarely asked, meaning the bathroom was usually open when a kid had to go right this minute.

This was a particularly useful one for me to see because it also showed me how restrictions can be helpful in serving a particular group, and that total openness to everyone isn’t always the best way to go. I had originally been an advocate of re-keying that bathroom and having it operate just like all the other ones, based on a vague principle of maximum access. However, watching how that bathroom was actually used helped me understand the usefulness of keeping it semi-reserved for people who had specific reasons (from “I’m trans and not comfortable using a gendered restroom at this stage” to “I’m two years old and haven’t learned how to anticipate when I will need to go”) to use that particular bathroom. Turns out our head librarian knew more than I realized she knew (spoiler alert: this will be a recurring theme in posts about that library—she is great and is a big role model for me).

#5: Screen readers can't read pictures →

From Emma:

This one turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be, in part because it involved checking into more places than I realized I would need to look at. I started by making a list of online platforms that my library (Dallas Public Library) uses that might have images on them. First there is the library website itself, which is actually managed by three different entities with different web practices:

1. The main website, which is part of the City of Dallas website and managed by the City’s Computer and Information Services department

2. The public access catalog, which is an Innovative Interfaces product and runs on a platform that they designed and manage

3. The events calendar and room reservation service, which are Library Market products and run on a platform that they design and manage

On top of that, the library also disseminates information on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest and Youtube.

If I were part of the team that manages the system’s social media use or part of the team that chooses our vendors, I can see that part of my responsibility would be to advocate for choices that prioritize accessibility features, alt text included. However, I just work at a branch, so I have access to exactly three of all these platforms: the Library Market calendar, Facebook and Nextdoor. I decided to look into how these sites handle alt text.

Facebook makes it pretty easy by automatically generating alt text for your images, but you can customize it to your own text by following the steps on this help page.

Nextdoor was…not like that. I searched their help pages for “alt text” and “accessibility” and didn’t get any results, so I used WebAim’s WAVE tool to evaluate one of the pages to see if alt text was present for the images Nextdoor itself had uploaded, and it found that a bunch of them were missing. I decided I’d contact the company and ask them what the situation was, but you can’t even do that without creating a Nextdoor account. So I’ve flagged that as something to investigate more later. For now I’ll make a note to assume that any images posted are completely unusable by people using screen readers, and accordingly that anything I post should have equivalent information posted as text at the same time.

I also checked a few postings for library events on the event calendar pages managed by Library Market, and found missing alt text there as well. However, that was on something posted by library staff—the images that were part of the Library Market site design did have alt text, so at least I know it’s possible. I did a search to see if I could find instructions on how to add alt text and didn’t find any help on their public website, but it’s possible that it’s available to users when they are logged in. I had to set this one aside for further research during work time, since I obviously don’t do the blog at work.

This was kind of a discouraging tip to implement, since I found out that only one of my three marketing channels was in a good place as far as alt text. However, even if I’m not able to get alt text on the other two channels, at least now I’m aware of that shortcoming and I can be extra conscious in my postings to make sure that the information is conveyed in another way that is accessible to people using screen readers.

#4: Keep paths open →

From Emma:

I pushed a large shelving cart around my library branch at closing last week. I was happy to see that I could pass through almost all the paths, although some of the turns were a little tight. The only place I really encountered a problem was near a window where we have a little round table set up with a couple of chairs around it. You can pass comfortably between the window and the table if and only if there is no chair on that side. I think when we first put chairs out around that table, we had them parallel to the window, like this:

However, patrons (reasonably) moved the chairs around as they saw fit, and someone had rearranged a chair so that they could sit facing away from the window, with the chair in between it and the table.

I could add "change the position of the chairs at this table" to my closing sweep routine, but rather than try to remember that every day and hope my colleagues do the same, I'm just going to shift this table further away from the window so that there is enough space for someone to position their chair in between the the without making it hard for some patrons to go by.

Additional note: When I added the image of the arrangement of the wall, chairs, and table to this post, I thought it was the first image on this site and I had to research how to add alt text (see Tip #5: Screen readers can't read pictures). That made me realize that the site also had a CC-BY-NC creative commons license icon on it, and that that icon didn't have alt text! I'm going to go back and add that now also, so this exercise ended up serving a double purpose.

#3: Left-handed patrons need computers too →

From Emma:

I have to admit an almost complete lack of success with this tip. At my library, it's physically fairly easy to move the mouse from the right-hand side of the keyboard to the left side (thank you to whoever arranged all the cables the way they did!). There is also a decent amount of space in which to move the mouse around on the left side.

I can't tell for sure, but I think that our public computer arrangement is the same as it was at 'peak computer' when there were constant waiting lists for the machines before laptops and smartphones became affordable. However, this did make me think that if your library is one of the ones that now has excess capacity, you might be able to make the patron experience better my removing some of those machines so that the remaining ones have more space. This would be helpful not just for left-handed patrons who need mouse room, but also for people who come to work in pairs, and for staff members who need to stand at someone's side and talk them through a task.

Unfortunately, there is no way to access the settings that swap the mouse buttons on our machines. They, like most of the other functions on the public computers, are completely locked down. I've brought this to the attention of library administration before, and they say it's on the list of future updates. Our public computers are managed by the city's IT department rather than by the library, so it's hard to get them to prioritize interface changes on public machines because most of the computers they manage are staff computers and I just don't think they see the public ones offered by the library as central to their mission. This is obviously a frustrating situation, but at least now that I have looked into it I will have an answer for a patron who might ask, even if it's not a very satisfying one.

#2: Dogs are sometimes allowed →

From Emma:

It's nice to check out a tip and discover your library is already doing a fine job! I was happy to find that my library had no misleading signs on the front doors and a code of conduct that permitted service animals. That said, that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything from trying out this tip, because I definitely did. Here are the details.

I checked the Dallas Public Library's Code of Conduct for any mention of service animals, dogs, or just plain animals, and found this:

"Introducing any animals, insects or other living organisms into City buildings without express permission of the City staff, with the exception of service animals, such as seeing-eye dogs or other guide-trained animals."

Interestingly, this is in a list of behaviors that "are prohibited if in the clear judgment of city staff, on a case-by-case basis, they disrupt the environment for other users of the facilities" which seems to imply that if staff judges that bringing a non-service animal into the library is not disruptive to other patrons, we can allow it. This is pretty cool, because that means we can allow emotional support animals in the library if they don't cause problems for other users.

As you might know if you're the kind of person who reads this blog, there is a difference between service dogs and emotional support animals. Only the former are protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act and, at least in the U.S., there are generally no laws against banning emotional support animals from either private or public buildings (here's a Department of Justice FAQ with more info).

While there are plenty of horror stories out there about library patrons slapping a vest they ordered on the internet on their poorly-behaved pet and bringing her into the library where she jumps on other patrons and pees in the stacks, there are also probably situations where having a well-behaved emotional support animal could help a patron make better use of the library without causing any trouble. The waiting list for a trained service dog can be long, the dogs can be expensive, and not everyone who could benefit from an emotional support animal needs a service dog--for example, a dog whose mere presence calms someone during an anxiety attack is an emotional support animal, not a service animal, since it is not trained to take a specific action when the attack occurs.

I'm adding this to my list of things to talk to my colleagues about, because I certainly had no idea that we could allow emotional support dogs in the library, and I bet they didn't either. That way, we can be on the same page about what our options are and do our best to be consistent about what we do and don't allow in our library.

#1: Label your non-English materials in their own language →

From Emma:

I implemented this tip at the downtown branch of the Capital Area District Library in the Lansing, Michigan area. The existing setup was acrylic label holders for each collection with a "world languages" graphic on the left and the name of the language, in English, on the right.

Since I was new and cautious, I checked my translations in two different dictionaries for each language. The only case where I came across anything at all complicated was Somali, which appeared Romanized as af Soomaali but also in Arabic as اَف صَومالي . I wasn't initially sure what was more appropriate, so I settled it by opening several of the books in the collection. All of them used the Roman alphabet, so that was what I went with.

More than anything, this turned out to be an arts and crafts challenge. Normally for shelf labels I would use a label maker, but the label maker I had couldn't handle any non-Roman characters, so I had to resort to printing out a Word document with the labels and cutting them out, which I am not good at. If I could go back in time and do it again, I would use Excel and turn on light grid lines to act as cutting guidelines.

The other problem was that the new labels, which included both the native language name of the language and the English name (the latter for the convenience of English-speaking shelvers) were longer than the old ones and wouldn't fit in the existing acrylic label holders. I looked into ordering new ones, but they turn out to be very expensive (about eight dollars per holder, in the quantity we wanted), so I had to just tape the paper labels to the shelves. Those are going to require more maintenance, so I saved the label template somewhere prominent but logical in our shared file system so that it should be easy to find and reprint any labels that get damaged.

Overall, though, this was mostly an easy tip to implement. It required no new materials and it took about an hour to locate the terms, print them out, and cut out and replace the new labels. I did notice that the non-English collections were organized alphabetically by their English name (Arabic, Chinese, French, Somali, etc.), which seems really arbitrary for most users, but I couldn't think of a better alternative for now.