Colour blind!

At one of my past schools, the Principal kept suggesting that I abandon the Dewey Decimal System and create some colour-coded Key Learning Areas (KLAs) in the Teacher Reference section of the school library. Some teachers would complain that they “didn’t understand Dewey” or “couldn’t ever find anything.” This were the bad ol’ days of drawers crammed full of catalogue cards, but I never really understood the problem. My counter argument was always that Dewey is essentially in KLAs anyway, and so many books are useful for numerous KLAs. I was gone from the position for a year and the change to shelving in the TR section was done in my absence. I came back for a few visits: the colours chosen were definitely not good for a colour blind person. Lime, orange, red and green all side by side! And blue next to purple. Torture!

Speedminton Fun Speeder
What shuttlecock?

Interfiling TR with the main collection is a great idea for many items. A high school I visited during my initial retraining was creating a brand new library collection with no separate TR section. Almost everything was being interfiled with the main collection. Certainly, in a high school, many items hidden away in TR could be very useful in student assignments. A few years ago, at mu current school, I moved a lot of neglected art books (written for children but stored in TR and seemingly ignored/forgotten/overlooked by most teachers) into regular non fiction, where they are used more frequently by students. When I took over in the library, one of my first major reorganising jobs was to disband (barely-used) reading boxes that had been colour-coded with small, self-adhesive dots. When people came in asking for a particular set of coded colours, I would be beyond frustration trying to find the correct ones, usually having to open the lid of every box.

Actually, our non fiction resources now have little, square, spine stickers representing their ten broad Dewey categories – we use the exact colours of Syba Signs’ shelf labels, after my SASS person saw the system working well in another school. It was mainly to assist the library monitors with sorting and reshelving the NF section more efficiently, but the stickers are quite useless to me, colour blind as I am. (Luckily the PRC stickers colours are quite distinguishable.)

When I worked at Ryde State Office of the NSW DEC, I was often called in to look at various curriculum units’ website designs, and help them pick onscreen colours that worked better for red/green colour blind people.

Please consider that the alterations you make to your library shelves (and web pages) can have repercussions for those who come after you!

Access and equity: blog post inspires blog post!

colourblind
My recent post about my colour blindness, over on my other blog, has inspired Craig Thomler‘s latest post on eGov au.

Craig asks, “Do government communications discriminate against – or for – the visually impaired?” He continues, “Despite the requirement for government in Australia to ensure our websites are accessible, I worry both that we do not do enough, and that we do too much, in this area.”

The Curriculum Directorate colleague (at Ryde State Office of the NSW Department of Education & Training), mentioned in my initial post, did spread the word about my “condition” – with my permission, of course – and I became an unofficial colour evaluation guinea pig for several Units’ web page revamps for the Departmental website while I was there. It was fun, and fascinating.

Mind you, while I was able to help them with specifications to aid my red/green colour blindness, there are other types. Where does all the beta testing end? 😉 I know we tried to address numerous aspects of accessibility for the “Scan” and School Libraries web pages while I was there, and our tweaking of the book rap blogs and wikis have been ongoing. But it seems there’s always so much more you can do to make a site more accessible and equitable.

That web composers are open to suggestions (and complaints) from people trying to use their site, is of paramount importance. For example, as pretty as Flash animations may be, to use only such a visual on the front page of a site can mean that people using old browsers or computers can’t even progress to the page with contact details to lodge a complaint! (I’ve been there before!)

Thanks for the link to my blog post, Craig!