Research guides: Best practices for design & accessibility

This page suggests some tasks and projects LibGuide owners can consider. Where a page on the guide goes into more detail on a topic, a link to that location provided.

Here are a few tasks that should take you no more than an hour or two (depending on how many you undertake!):

• Find places on your guides where you can convert enlarged or bolded text to Headings
• Add alt text to your images - very important! We should not have images in our LibGuides that do not contain alt text. Depending on how many images you have on your guides, this could be a medium-term project; however, it is very important and should be attended to ASAP
• Remove or move any important items that you have relegated to the left margin under the tabs (except Profile boxes - those are okay!)
• Rename (if necessary) your homepage "Home"
• Shorten your side menu titles to 3 words maximum
• Ensure that the Guide Type is appropriate for your guide
• Add subjects to your guide for better findability
• Reorder any alphabetized lists by relevance
• Create friendly URLs for your guides and pages
• Remove any screenshots of search boxes
• Ensure that all videos linked to your guide are captioned
• Run a link check and update broken links. If you are doing this regularly, it should not take very long!
• Remove any images that are purely decorative
• Set any guide that has two or more pages to Show box-level navigation of selected page

Here are some projects that you might reserve for a quieter time of year, or request the support of one of our Master of Information interns:

• Review your guide for possible deletions of sections that are either outdated or filler - be concise!
• Shift your most important items to the Home page
• Adjust any walls of text to bullet points
• Add short, meaningful resource resource descriptions to all items on your guides
• Reduce/eliminate library jargon
• Ensure all databases are entered as Database assets rather than as Links
• If all of your images have alt-text already, see if you can improve the alt text
• For embedded videos, add a link below to their location on YouTube for users who require a transcript
• Ensure that any links appearing in Rich Text are contextual (no "click here"!)
• Add tags to your guides to improve discoverability
• Change any links that connect to books to Book from the Catalog assets

Here are some longer term projects that would be worth considering.

• Create course guides for classes you teach in
• Incorporate instructional content into your guides