All posts by Zeke Graves

Digitization Specialist Digital Production Center Duke University Libraries

Web Accessibility at Duke Libraries and Beyond — a Quick Start Guide

Coming on board as the new Web Experience Developer in the Assessment and User Experience Services (AUXS) Department in early 2022, one of my first priorities was to get up to speed on Web Accessibility guidelines and testing. I wanted to learn how these standards had been applied to Library websites to date and establish my own processes and habits for ongoing evaluation and improvement. Flash-forward one year, and I’m looking back at the steps that I took and reflecting on lessons learned and projects completed. I thought it might be helpful to myself and others in a similar situation (e.g. new web developers, designers, or content creators) to organize these experiences and reflections into a sort of manual or “Quick Start Guide”. I hope that these 5 steps will be useful to others who need a crash course in this potentially confusing or intimidating–but ultimately crucial and rewarding–territory.

Learn from your colleagues

Fortunately, I quickly discovered that Duke Libraries already had a well-established culture and practice around web accessibility, including a number of resources I could consult.

Two Bitstreams posts from our longtime web developer/designer Sean Aery gave me a quick snapshot of the current state of things, recent initiatives, and ongoing efforts:

Repositories of the Library’s open source software projects proved valuable in connecting broader concepts with specific examples and seeing how other developers had solved problems. For instance, I was able to look at the code for DUL’s “theme” (basically visual styling, color, typography, and other design elements) to better understand how it builds on the ubiquitous Bootstrap CSS framework and implements specific accessibility standards around semantic markup, color contrast, and ARIA roles/attributes:

Screenshot of Duke Libraries' public website Gitlab repository
The repo is your friend

Equipped with some background and context, I found I was much better prepared to formulate questions for team meetings or the project Slack channel.

Look for guidelines from your institution

Duke’s Web Accessibility Initiative establishes clear web accessibility standards for the University and offers practical information on how to understand and implement them:

Duke Accessibility "How To..." page

The site also offers guides geared towards the needs of different stakeholders (content creators, designers, developers) as well as a step-by-step overview of how to do an accessibility assessment.

Duke Accessibility "Key concepts for web developers" page

Know your standards

Duke University has specified the Worldwide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0, Level AA Conformance (WCAG 2.0 Level AA) as its preferred accessibility standard for websites. While it was initially daunting to digest and parse these technical documents, at least I had a known, widely-adopted target that I was aiming for–in other words, an achievable goal. Feeling bolstered by that knowledge, I was able to use the other resources mentioned here to fill in the gaps and get hands-on experience and practice solving web accessibility issues.

Screenshot of WCAG 2.0 standards document
RTFM, ok?

Find a playground

As I settled into the workflow within our Scrum team (based on Agile software development principles), I found a number of projects that gave me opportunities to test and experiment with how different markup and design decisions affect accessibility. I particularly enjoyed working with updating the Style Guide for our Catalog as part of a Bootstrap 3–>4 migration, updating our DUL Theme across various applications — Library Catalog, Quicksearch, Staff Directory — built on the Ruby on Rails framework, and getting scrappy and creative trying to improve branding and accessibility of some of our vendor-hosted web apps with the limited tools available (essentially jQuery scripts and applying CSS to existing markup).

Build your toolkit

A few well-chosen tools can get you far in assessing and correcting web accessibility issues on your websites.

Browser Tools

The built-in developer tools in your browser are essential for viewing and testing changes to markup and understanding how CSS rules are applied to the Document Object Model. The Deque Systems aXe Chrome Extension (also available for Firefox) adds additional tools for accessibility testing with a slick interface that performs a scan, gives a breakdown of accessibility violations ranked by severity, and tells you how to fix them.

Color Contrast Checkers

I frequently turned to these two web-based tools for quick tests of different color combinations. It was educational to see what did and didn’t work in various situations and think more about how aesthetic and design concerns interact with accessibility concerns.

Screenshot of WebAIM color contrast checker
While this color combo technically passes WCAG 2.0 AA and uses colors from the Duke Brand Guide, I probably won’t be using it any time soon

Style Guides

These style guides provided a handy reference for default and variant typography, color, and page design elements. I found the color palettes particular helpful as I tried to find creative solutions to color contrast problems while maintaining Duke branding and consistency across various Library pages.

Keyboard-Only Navigation

Attempting to navigate our websites using only the TAB, ENTER, SPACE, UP, and DOWN keys on a standard computer keyboard gave me a better understanding of the significance of semantic markup, skip links, and landmarks. This test is essential for getting another “view” of your pages that isn’t as dependent on visual cues to convey meaning and structure and can help surface issues that automated accessibility scanners might miss.

Labor in the Time of Coronavirus

The Coronavirus pandemic has me thinking about labor–as a concept, a social process, a political constituency, and the driving force of our economy–in a way that I haven’t in my lifetime. It’s become alarmingly clear (as if it wasn’t before) that we all need food, supplies, and services to survive past next week, and that there are real human beings out there working to produce and deliver these things. No amount of entrepreneurship, innovation, or financial sleight of hand will help us through the coming months if people are not working to provide the basic requirements for life as we know it.

This blog post draws from  images in our digitized library collections to pay tribute to all of the essential workers who are keeping us afloat during these challenging times. As I browsed these photographs and mused on our current situation, a few important and oft-overlooked questions came to mind.

Who grows our food? Where does it come from and how is it processed? How does it get to us?

Bell pepper pickers, 1984 June. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.
Prisoners at the county farm killing hogs, 1983 Mar. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.
Worker atop rail car loading corn from storage tanks, 1991 Sept. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.
Manuel Molina, mushroom farm worker, Kennett Square, PA 1981. Frank Espada Photographs.

What kind of physical environment do we work in and how does that affect us?

Maids in a room of the Stephen Decatur Hotel shortly before it was torn down, 1970. Paul Kwilecki Photographs
Worker in pit preparing to weld. Southeastern Minerals Co. Bainbridge, 1991 Aug. Paul Kwilecki Photographs
Loggers in the woods near Attapulgus, 1978 Feb. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.

How do we interact with machines and technology in our work? Can our labor be automated or performed remotely?

Worker signaling for more logs. Elberta Crate and Box. Co. Bainbridge, 1991 Sept. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.
Worker, Williamson-Dickie plant. Bainbridge, 1991 Sept. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.
Machine operator watching computer controlled lathe, 1991 July. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.
Worker at her machine. Elberta Crate and Box Co. Bainbridge, 1981 Nov. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.

What equipment and clothing do we need to work safely and productively?

Cotton gin worker wearing safety glass and ear plugs for noise protection. Decatur Gin Co., 1991 Sept. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.
Worker operating bagging machine. Flint River Mills. Bainbridge, 1991 July. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.
Worker at State Dock, 1992 July. Paul Kwilecki Photographs.

Are we paid fairly for our work? How do relative wages for different types of work reflect what is valued in our society?

No known title. William Gedney Photographs.

How we think about and respond to these questions will inform how we navigate the aftermath of this ongoing crisis and whether or not we thrive into the future. As we celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1 and beyond, I hope everyone will take some time to think about what labor means to them and to our society as a whole.

Mythical Beasts of Audio

Gear. Kit. Hardware. Rig. Equipment.

In the audio world, we take our tools seriously, sometimes to an unhealthy and obsessive degree. We give them pet names, endow them with human qualities, and imbue them with magical powers. In this context, it’s not really strange that a manufacturer of professional audio interfaces would call themselves “Mark of the Unicorn.”

Here at the Digital Production Center, we recently upgraded our audio interface to a MOTU 896 mk3 from an ancient (in tech years) Edirol UA-101. The audio interface, which converts analog signals to digital and vice-versa, is the heart of any computer-based audio system. It controls all of the routing from the analog sources (mostly cassette and open reel tape decks in our case) to the computer workstation and the audio recording/editing software. If the audio interface isn’t seamlessly performing analog to digital conversion at archival standards, we have no hope of fulfilling our mission of creating high-quality digital surrogates of library A/V materials.

Edirol UA-101
The Edirol enjoying its retirement with some other pieces of kit

While the Edirol served us well from the very beginning of the Library’s forays into audio digitization, it had recently begun to cause issues resulting in crashes, restarts, and lost work. Given that the Edirol is over 10 years old and has been discontinued, it is expected that it would eventually fail to keep up with continued OS and software updates. After re-assessing our needs and doing a bit of research, we settled on the MOTU 896 mk3 as its replacement. The 896 had the input, output, and sync options we needed along with plenty of other bells and whistles.

I’ve been using the MOTU for several weeks now, and here are some things that I’m liking about it:

  • Easy installation of drivers
  • Designed to fit into standard audio rack
  • Choice of USB or Firewire connection to PC workstation
  • Good visual feedback on audio levels, sample rate, etc. via LED meters on front panel
  • Clarity and definition of sound
MOTU 896mk3
The MOTU sitting atop the audio tower

I haven’t had a chance to explore all of the additional features of the MOTU yet, but so far it has lived up to expectations and improved our digitization workflow. However, in a production environment such as ours, each piece of equipment needs to be a workhorse that can perform its function day in and day out as we work our way through the vaults. Only time can tell if the Mark of the Unicorn will be elevated to the pantheon of gear that its whimsical name suggests!

Vote!

In anticipation of next Tuesday’s midterm elections, here is a photo gallery of voting-related images from Duke Digital Collections. Click on a photo to view more images from our collections dealing with political movements, voting rights, propaganda, activism, and more!

This image is part of a series of photographs taken by James Karales on assignment for Look Magazine during the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in March 1965.
Propaganda poster of the Italian Socialist Party. It reads: “Workers, vote for socialism means voting for women’s rights and labor.”
Image is part of “Thirteen-Month Crop: One Year in the Life of a Piedmont Virginia Tobacco Farm,” which documents the Moore family farm in Pittsylvania County, Virginia.
Poster with depiction of large PCI flag with the Italian flag behind it.
Leaflet created by the League of Women Voters of North Carolina.
Socialist Party literature, explaining their views.

If you haven’t already taken advantage of early voting, we at Bitstreams encourage you to exercise your right on November 6!

Charm City Sounds

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the 52nd Association for Recorded Sound Collections Annual Conference in Baltimore, MD.  From the ARSC website:

Founded in 1966, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Inc. is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of sound recordings—in all genres of music and speech, in all formats, and from all periods.

ARSC is unique in bringing together private individuals and institutional professionals. Archivists, librarians, and curators representing many of the world’s leading audiovisual repositories participate in ARSC alongside record collectors, record dealers, researchers, historians, discographers, musicians, engineers, producers, reviewers, and broadcasters.

ARSC’s vitality springs from more than 1000 knowledgeable, passionate, helpful members who really care about sound recordings.

ARSC Annual Conferences encourage open sharing of knowledge through informative presentations, workshops, and panel discussions. Tours, receptions, and special local events heighten the camaraderie that makes ARSC conferences lively and enjoyable.

This quote highlights several of the things that have made ARSC resources valuable and educational to me as the Audio Production Specialist at Duke Libraries:

  • The group’s membership includes both professionals and enthusiasts from a variety of backgrounds and types of institutions.
  • Members’ interests and specialties span a broad array of musical genres, media types, and time periods.
  • The organization serves as a repository of knowledge on obscure and obsolete sound recording media and technology.

This year’s conference offered a number of presentations that were directly relevant to our work here in Digital Collections and Curation Services, highlighting audio collections that have been digitized and the challenges encountered along the way.  Here’s a quick recap of some that stood out to me:

  • “Uncovering the Indian Neck Folk Festival Collection” by Maya Lerman (Folklife Center, Library of Congress).  This presentation showcased a collection of recordings and related documentation from a small invitation-only folk festival that ran from 1961-2014 and included early performances from Reverend Gary Davis, Dave Van Ronk, and Bob Dylan.  It touched on some of the difficulties in archiving optical and born-digital media (lack of metadata, deterioration of CD-Rs) as well as the benefits of educating prospective donors on best practices for media and documentation.
  • “A Garage in South Philly: The Vernacular Music Research Archive of Thornton Hagert” by David Sager and Anne Stanfield-Hagert.  This presentation paid tribute to the massive jazz archive of the late Mr. Hagert, comprising over 125,000 items of printed music, 75,000 recordings, 5,500 books, and 2,000 periodicals.  It spoke to the difficulties of selling or donating a private collection of this magnitude without splitting it up and undoing the careful, but idiosyncratic organizational structure as envisioned by the collector.
  • “Freedom is a Constant Struggle: The Golden State Mutual Sound Recordings” by Kelly Besser, Yasmin Dessem and Shanni Miller (UCLA Library).  This presentation covered the audio material from the archive of an African American-owned insurance company founded in 1925 in the Bay Area.  While audio was only a small part of this larger collection, the speakers demonstrated how it added additional context and depth to photographs, video, and written documents.  They also showed how this kind of archival audio can be an important tool in telling the stories of previously suppressed or unheard voices.
  • “Sounds, Sights and Sites of Activism in ’68” by Guha Shankar (Library of Congress).  This presentation examined a collection of recordings from “Resurrection City” in Washington, DC.  This was an encampment that was part of the Poor People’s Campaign, a demonstration for human rights organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. prior to his assassination in 1968.  The talk showed how these archival documents are being accessed and used to inform new forms of social and political activism and wider circulation via podcasts, websites, public lecture and exhibitions.

The ARSC Conference also touched on my personal interests in American traditional and vernacular music, especially folk and blues from the early 20th Century.  Presentations on the bluegrass scene in Baltimore, blues guitarist Johnny Shines, education outreach by the creators of PBS’s “American Epic” documentaries, and Hickory, NC’s own Blue Sky Boys provided a welcome break from favorite archivist topics such as metadata, workflows, and quality control.  Other fun parts of the conference included an impromptu jam session, a silent auction of books & records, and posters documenting the musical history of Baltimore.  True to the city’s nickname, I was charmed by my time in Baltimore and inspired by the amazingly diverse and dedicated work towards collecting and preserving our audio heritage by the ARSC community.

 

 

Snow Daze: Winter Weather Survival Tips

Snow is a major event here in North Carolina, and the University and Library were operating accordingly under a “severe weather policy” last week due to 6-12 inches of frozen precipitation. While essential services continued undeterred, most of the Library’s staff and patrons were asked to stay home until conditions had improved enough to safely commute to and navigate the campus. In celebration of last week’s storm, here are some handy tips for surviving and enjoying the winter weather–illustrated entirely with images from Duke Digital Collections!

  1. Stock up on your favorite vices and indulgences before the storm hits.

2. Be sure to bundle and layer up your clothing to stay warm in the frigid outdoor temperatures.

3. Plan some fun outdoor activities to keep malaise and torpor from settling in.

4. Never underestimate the importance of a good winter hat.

5. While snowed in, don’t let your personal hygiene slip too far.

6. Despite the inconveniences brought on by the weather, don’t forget to see the beauty and uniquity around you.

7. If all else fails, escape to sunnier climes.

8. Be thankful that Spring is on the way!

The images in this post are taken from the following digitized collections:  J. Walter Thompson Ford Motor Co. Advertisements, Ad*Access, William Gedney Photographs and Writings, Paul Kwilecki PhotographsW. Duke, Sons & Co. Advertising Materials, and Americans in the Land of Lenin: Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia.

Stay warm!

Let’s Get Small: a tribute to the mighty microcassette

In past posts, I’ve paid homage to the audio ancestors with riffs on such endangered–some might say extinct–formats as DAT and Minidisc.  This week we turn our attention to the smallest (and perhaps the cutest) tape format of them all:  the Microcassette.

Introduced by the Olympus Corporation in 1969, the Microcassette used the same width tape (3.81 mm) as the more common Philips Compact Cassette but housed it in a much smaller and less robust plastic shell.  The Microcassette also spooled from right to left (opposite from the compact cassette) as well as using slower recording speeds of 2.4 and 1.2 cm/s.  The speed adjustment, allowing for longer uninterrupted recording times, could be toggled on the recorder itself.  For instance, the original MC60 Microcassette allowed for 30 minutes of recorded content per “side” at standard speed and 60 minutes per side at low speed.

The microcassette was mostly used for recording voice–e.g. lectures, interviews, and memos.  The thin tape (prone to stretching) and slow recording speeds made for a low-fidelity result that was perfectly adequate for the aforementioned applications, but not up to the task of capturing the wide dynamic and frequency range of music.  As a result, the microcassette was the go-to format for cheap, portable, hand-held recording in the days before the smartphone and digital recording.  It was standard to see a cluster of these around the lectern in a college classroom as late as the mid-1990s.  Many of the recorders featured voice-activated recording (to prevent capturing “dead air”) and continuously variable playback speed to make transcription easier.

The tiny tapes were also commonly used in telephone answering machines and dictation machines.

As you may have guessed, the rise of digital recording, handheld devices, and cheap data storage quickly relegated the microcassette to a museum piece by the early 21st century.  While the compact cassette has enjoyed a resurgence as a hip medium for underground music, the poor audio quality and durability of the microcassette have largely doomed it to oblivion except among the most willful obscurantists.  Still, many Rubenstein Library collections contain these little guys as carriers of valuable primary source material.  That means we’re holding onto our Microcassette player for the long haul in all of its atavistic glory.

image by the author. other images in this post taken from Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Microcassette)

 

Cutting Through the Noise

Noise is an inescapable part of our sonic environment.  As I sit at my quiet library desk writing this, I can hear the undercurrent of the building’s pipes and HVAC systems, the click-clack of the Scribe overhead book scanner, footsteps from the floor above, doors opening and closing in the hallway, and the various rustlings of my own fidgeting.  In our daily lives, our brains tune out much of this extraneous noise to help us focus on the task at hand and be alert to sounds conveying immediately useful information: a colleagues’s voice, a cell-phone buzz, a fire alarm.

When sound is recorded electronically, however, this tuned-out noise is often pushed to the foreground.  This may be due to the recording conditions (e.g. a field recording done on budget equipment in someone’s home or outdoors) or inherent in the recording technology itself (electrical interference, mechanical surface noise).  Noise is always present in the audio materials we digitize and archive, many of which are interviews, oral histories, and events recorded to cassette or open reel tape by amateurs in the field.  Our first goal is to make the cleanest and most direct analog-to-digital transfer possible, and then save this as our archival master .wav file with no alterations.  Once this is accomplished, we have some leeway to work with the digital audio and try to create a more easily listenable and intelligible access copy.

img_2190

I recently started experimenting with Steinberg WaveLab software to clean up digitized recordings from the Larry Rubin Papers.  This collection contains some amazing documentation of Rubin’s work as a civil rights organizer in the 1960s, but the ever-present hum & hiss often threaten to obscure the content.  I worked with two plug-ins in WaveLab to try to mitigate the noise while leaving the bulk of the audio information intact.

plugin1

Even if you don’t know it by name, anyone who has used electronic audio equipment has probably heard the dreaded 60 Cycle Hum.  This is a fixed low-frequency tone that is related to our main electric power grid operating at 120 volts AC in the United States.  Due to improper grounding and electromagnetic interference from nearby wires and appliances, this current can leak into our audio signals and appear as the ubiquitous 60 Hz hum (disclaimer–you may not be able to hear this as well on tiny laptop speakers or earbuds).  Wavelab’s De-Buzzer plug-in allowed me to isolate this troublesome frequency and reduce its volume level drastically in relation to the interview material.  Starting from a recommended preset, I adjusted the sensitivity of the noise reduction by ear to cut unwanted hum without introducing any obvious digital artifacts in the sound.

plugin2

Similarly omnipresent in analog audio is High-Frequency Hiss.  This wash of noise is native to any electrical system (see Noise Floor) and is especially problematic in tape-based media where the contact of the recording and playback heads against the tape introduces another level of “surface noise.”  I used the De-Noiser plug-in to reduce hiss while being careful not to cut into the high-frequency content too much.  Applying this effect too heavily could make the voices in the recording sound dull and muddy, which would be counterproductive to improving overall intelligibility.

Listen to the before & after audio snippets below.  While the audio is still far from perfect due to the original recording conditions, conservative application of the noise reduction tools has significantly cleaned up the sound.  It’s possible to cut the noise even further with more aggressive use of the effects, but I felt that would do more harm than good to the overall sound quality.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

 

I was fairly pleased with these results and plan to keep working with these and other software tools in the future to create digital audio files that meet the needs of archivists and researchers.  We can’t eliminate all of the noise from our media-saturated lives, but we can always keep striving to keep the signal-to-noise ratio at manageable and healthy levels.

 

img_2187

Digitizing for Exhibits

While most of my Bitstreams posts have focused on my work preserving and archiving audio collections, my job responsibilities also include digitizing materials for display in Duke University Libraries Exhibits.  The recent renovation and expansion of the Perkins Library entrance and the Rubenstein Library have opened up significantly more gallery space, meaning more exhibits being rotated through at a faster pace.

gallery2

Just in the past year, I’ve created digital images for exhibits on Vesalius’s study of human anatomy, William Gedney’s photographs, Duke Chapel’s stained glass windows, and the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.  I also worked with a wide range of materials spanning “books, manuscripts, photographs, recordings and artifacts that document human aspirations” for the Dreamers and Dissenters exhibit celebrating the reopening of the newly renovated David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.  The digital images are used to create enlargements and facsimiles for the physical exhibits and are also used in the online “virtual exhibits.”

 

Working with such a variety of media spanning different library collections presents a number of challenges and necessitates working closely with our Exhibits and Conservation departments.  First, we have to make sure that we have all of the items listed in the inventory provided by the exhibit curator.  Secondly, we have to make sure we have all of the relevant information about how each item should be digitally captured (e.g. What image resolution and file specifications?  Which pages from a larger volume?  What section of a larger map or print?)  Next we have to consider handling for items that are in fragile condition and need special attention.  Finally, we use all of this information to determine which scanner, camera, or A/V deck is appropriate for each item and what the most efficient order to capture them in is.

All of this planning and preliminary work helps to ensure that the digitization process goes smoothly and that most questions and irregularities have already been addressed.  Even so, there are always issues that come up forcing us to improvise creative solutions.  For instance:  how to level and stabilize a large, fragile folded map that is tipped into a volume with tight binding?  How to assemble a seamless composite image of an extremely large poster that has to be photographed in multiple sections?  How to minimize glare and reflection from glossy photos that are cupped from age?  I won’t give away all of our secrets here, but I’ll provide a couple examples from the Duke Chapel exhibit that is currently on display in the Jerry and Bruce Chappell Family gallery.

angel

This facsimile of a drawing for one of the Chapel’s carved angels was reproduced from an original architectural blueprint.  It came to us as a large and tightly rolled blueprint–so large, in fact, that we had to add a piece of plywood to our usual camera work surface to accommodate it.  We then strategically placed weights around the blueprint to keep it flattened while not obscuring the section with the drawing.  The paper was still slightly wrinkled and buckled in places (which can lead to uneven color and lighting in the resulting digital image) but fortunately the already mottled complexion of the blueprint material made it impossible to notice these imperfections.

projection

These projected images of the Chapel’s stained glass were reproduced from slides taken by a student in 1983 and currently housed in the University Archives.  After the first run through our slide scanner, the digital images looked okay on screen, but were noticeably blurry when enlarged.  Further investigation of the slides revealed an additional clear plastic protective housing which we were able to carefully remove.  Without this extra refractive layer, the digital images were noticeably sharper and more vibrant.

Despite the digitization challenges, it is satisfying to see these otherwise hidden treasures being displayed and enjoyed in places that students, staff, and visitors pass through everyday–and knowing that we played a small part in contributing to the finished product!