2/11/2015 Federal Way Library Workshop Klarissa

Location: Federal Way Public Library

Time: 5-7

Date: 2/11/2015

Today, there were only two children, one older kid and an infant. Another kid, middle-school age, was doing homework in the back of the adult room. We had planned to make Valentine’s cards, and started to make a few after some negotiation with our one attendee, who wanted to read.

Again we had to move into the adult room at 6, time for storytime. There were a few kids in the children’s section of the library who gathered for storytime, which is good because I had felt bad that the librarian had shown up and there were no kids with us who would sit through storytime. The infant was not feeling well and fussy, the other was reading on her own. Since there was not much for Willa and I to do, we made cards in the back of the adult room. 

2/11/2015 Federal Way Branch Library Workshop Willa

Federal Way Branch Library

February 11^th, 2015

3:30 PM – 8:00 PM

            I brought my car to UW in order to make sure that we had enough room for all of the participants who needed a ride to KCLS. Ivette drove the U-car because though Klarissa and I both completed the certification, we were too nervous to drive the car. Not only was the car new and something I had no experience driving, I was also nervous about having children in the car and added confusion from the number of people in the car as well. We left a little late, but we were able to make it to the library on time. We only had one girl and one baby in the early literacy program. I chose to stay and help with the kids during the tour of the library because I want to make Valentine’s cards for my family and do some crafts. After the tour was over and the children’s story time started, I moved my crafts project into the adult digital literacy space. I made paper cranes for all of the participants while Ivette gave the lesson. I’m not sure that I fully engaged with the discussion, but I did notice some distinct differences between Ivette and Sarah’s teaching styles. Ivette, I think, was much more discursive and had the women teach each other more than Ivette teaching them. I think that is was much more open in terms of a class. Ivette’s style let it be an open forum where people could discuss and Ivette was just the discussion leader. Sarah’s teaching style seems to be much more structured. Sarah still has the women contribute, but Sarah is definitely moving with a purpose of teaching x or y. There was also a lengthy discussion in the car on the way back to Seattle about a man who had come into the room towards the end of the class. I was not in the room so I do not have much to say about the matter, but it seemed to me by way of the discussion that it was a very disrupting force.

2/11/2015 Federal Way Branch Library Workshop Klarissa

Location: Federal Way Public Library

Time: 5-7

Date: 2/11/2015

Today, there were only two children, one older kid and an infant. Another kid, middle-school age, was doing homework in the back of the adult room. We had planned to make Valentine’s cards, and started to make a few after some negotiation with our one attendee, who wanted to read.

Again we had to move into the adult room at 6, time for storytime. There were a few kids in the children’s section of the library who gathered for storytime, which is good because I had felt bad that the librarian had shown up and there were no kids with us who would sit through storytime. The infant was not feeling well and fussy, the other was reading on her own. Since there was not much for Willa and I to do, we made cards in the back of the adult room. 

At the end there was an interesting scenario, as we were packing to leave. A gentleman walked into the room, towards the back without saying anything, grabbed coffee, then asked what the event was as he left the room. I heightened my awareness when he walked in, but thought little of it until Ivette engaged a conversation in the car on this with all of us and asked me what my thoughts were. Mostly since he hadn't said anything when he entered, I was watching him, trying to figure out what he wanted. But I was on guard, as this was a man entering into a space filled with women and children. 

We want this to be a space welcoming to everyone, so this is an interesting thing to think about, how we judge those who enter as belonging or not. 

2-11-15 Federal Way, KCLS, Sarah White

Federal Way Branch Library

February 11^th, 2015

5:00 PM – 7:00 PM

Overview:

We only had two participants in the library tour. One participant told me, though, (paraphrasing) that it was very informative and that she never knew the library had so much to offer. I think that even though only two people received the information firsthand, if they share it with their social networks the information will be spread to more people.

For the second hour, Ivette led a discussion of staying in touch on the computer, which four people participated in. There was a lively discussion that ranged from "how young is too young to give your child a cell phone?" to "making calls with wi-fi that don't use data." Participants gave and received advice, viewpoints and opinions. The group interaction was great to see. An hour is a short amount of time, so there wasn't time to get hands-on with the tech, but I think everyone thought about it critically. 

Ivette can relate to many of the worries the women have as mothers, and I think that created a feeling of unity. We spoke of the many ways that we are different in terms of ethnicity, gender, and other in-group/out-group affiliations. But as a woman who has chosen not to have children, I notice that I am alienated from many other women my age or older who identify first and foremost as mothers, and who may have a hard time understanding why someone would not choose that identity.

One student brought up that she wanted to learn more about Word. Perhaps we can give her time to practice it next time, and I'll also show her the GCF aprende libre tutorials. She was also concerned about what her children were looking up online. While adding web-filtering to certain user accounts on the computer seemed difficult, I did show her how to look at the browser's history.

Evaluating the Accessibility of our Online Presence

One goal of this project is to help expose more underrepresented groups to the world of information technology. If our online presence is not easily accessible by people with visual impairments, issues with motor functionality, and other attributes that require special methods to get information from the web, then we are failing these overarching goals of accessibility.

A common tool used for internet-accessibility is a screen reader. These programs scan the HTML and CSS of web pages and read their content aloud for the user to hear. One of the most important aspects of web accessibility is building pages that can essentially 'play well' with these accessibility tools.

Several online services have the ability to access a website's accessibility: The website accessibility evaluation tool (or WAVE for short), and AChecker. Freddy and I used these to evaluate the three main websites we use for this project. Their results and commentary are as follows:

LatinaTech.org

Our website has a few errors in terms of accessibility. For users that need screen readers, alt-text for elements is necessary to describe pictures. None of the images on our website have alt-text, however, this is a fairly easy fix and will not take long to remedy.

The other main issue with latinatech.org is the contrast ratio of some text elements on the background. The design language of this website (links are orange + underlined) does not follow the 1:4.5 ratio of background to text color on some elements (mostly external links). To fix this, we would need to pick a different color to make all of the links on our page. This will take a bit longer than fixing the image alt-texts, but  it will be beneficial for users that have poor eyesight.

Casa-Latina.org

Many of the issues that LatinaTech.org had hold true for this website as well. None of the images have alt-text, which makes understanding the content difficult for users that cannot view images (or understand their significance).

The administrators of casa-latina.org can remedy this by modifying the HTML markup that makes up the site. This is not difficult for any web-savvy person to accomplish as long as they have access to the source code (which we do not)html tab
.

LatinaTech.blogspot.com

I am actually impressed with how few accessibility errors our blog has. Freddy’s accessibility reports only pointed out two different kinds of errors: The HTML document language is not specified, and the alt-texts for the little ‘edit’ pencil icons are not written. For any non-administrative user, they will never encounter these icons, so we need not take action here. I can fiddle with the HTML backend of our blog and try to fix the language header soon. Hopefully this will help users with visual impairments and screen-readers.


Tools used:
http://wave.webaim.org/

http://achecker.ca/checker/index.php