LiveWhale Files and Accessibility

After the accessibility session at the conference this week, I thought I’d share some things we are doing to help with the accessibility of files in LiveWhale.

First, we removed the ability for anyone to upload files, except admins, about 4 years ago. We require users to send us all files they want uploaded so we can check them for accessibility first. This has drastically reduced the number of PDFs, etc. that are added in the first place, and virtually eliminated new files that don’t pass accessibility requirements.

That may sound like a lot of work for the web team, but we don’t accept all files. We don’t allow any random flyers, posters, etc. To upload a file, there typically must be a requirement that the file exist on the website. Much of the time, the content in the file is better off as web content, and this gives us a chance to have that conversation with users.

When uploading or editing Files, we have a required custom field that looks like this…


Admins must choose one of those options in order to save the file. Our hope is that most choose option 1, but at least we will have a record of any that have known accessibility issues.
The only downside of this custom field is that we cannot use the Bulk or Quick Upload options since this field does not exist in those contexts, but that is a concession we can live with.

Our biggest challenge for this next year is the thousands of PDFs that were uploaded into LiveWhale before we enforced any of this. We plan to work with representatives from all groups in LiveWhale to identify which of their files are no longer needed and delete those. Out of the files that are kept, we will identify which ones are exempt per the ADA guidelines, and we will check/remediate the rest as needed.

We’ve only just begun this work, but the handful of groups we have contacted (the ones with the fewest files to start with) have mostly said, “we don’t need those anymore, get rid of them”. We are hopeful that this trend continues with the larger groups too.

2 Likes

On a related note, regarding the conversation about potential reporting options in LiveWhale, a report of files that are not linked anywhere in LiveWhale would be hugely beneficial as we work to determine which files are no longer needed.

3 Likes

agreed about that! Upvote+

we have been doing similar triage for years and typically have students trained who an do the remediation on pdfs we do need to fix. They also can make the web pages for things that do not need to be downloadable documents but can be web pages instead. In some cases, people send us pdfs from other websites, and we do not remediate those and instead try to link to the originals on the originating website. As a state school we get a lot of stuff from NYS which falls into that category…

1 Like