2025/02/26 Samvera Accessibility WG Meeting Notes

Attendees:

• Kate Lynch

• Robin Ruggabear

• Nick Homeda

• Margaret Mellinger

• Christine Peterson

Regrets:

• Rebekah Kati

• Jon Cameron

Notes:

• Partners announcement

  • Drafted by Robin:

    • The Samvera Community values accessibility and works to make all applications meet accessibility best practices, however, applications are not currently tested against WCAG standards and do not have Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs). At the 2024 spring partner meeting, this issue was discussed, and a call was made for a working group to work with various parts of the community to update technical roadmaps, workflows, testing methodologies, deployment, and documentation. The goal of this work is to ensure Samvera solutions meet the needs of all and comply with institutional requirements for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) ( e.g. UVA requires VPATs and that web applications comply with WCAG 2.2 AA standard). 

      If you are interested in learning more about our purpose, team, and deliverables, please see the working group's wiki page. Let us know if you have further questions or if you want to join our team. You can also find us on our Slack channel #accessibility.

      Regards,

      Working Group Co-Chairs on behalf of the Samvera Accessibility Working Group

      Kate Lynch, Princeton University

      Robin Ruggaber, University of Virginia

  • Robin will send this out to Partners ASAP.

  • Kate will ensure that this group gets onto an appropriate presentation agenda at Virtual Connect to report to the greater community.

• VPAT templates

  • Should we set up dedicated email addresses for the product owner and tech lead? Something not tethered to a specific individual.

  • Should have VPATs for Avalon, Hyku, and Hyrax, rather than a single all-Samvera one

• Ways to use GitHub to indicate accessibility engagement

  • Github labels?

  • GitHub milestones?

• Division of work

  • Draft commitment statements for each of the products

    • Commitment to accessibility

      • Robin will look for examples and come up with a generic draft

  • Kate will create a Google shared drive for us to add draft documents

  • Nick will look into Hyrax VPAT needs and will consult with Rebekah on this.

  • Margaret will work with Heather to see if we can set up a mailing list for Hyrax and Hyku each, for where requests about accessibility can go (to be linked in a VPAT).