Archives and museums have a great deal of images and other items in their collections and sites which are not digitally accessible. Digitization, preservation and sharing of information is wonderful but accessibility needs have to be considered. While it might not be feasible to get alt-text on all images or closed captioning on all videos currently in a archive and museum site but it would be a mistake to remove them because they are not currently accessible. Figuring out a way to add accessibility to your sites and into your workflow is very important.

Here are just a few crowdsourcing accessibility projects.

Describe It!

Describe It! is a Zooniverse project created by The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library. The goal of this project is to collect descriptions for every image in the Frick Art Reference Library ‘s digital Photoarchive. In this project, online volunteers write short descriptions for works of art in the Library’s Photoarchive collection. In order to obtain a variety of descriptions, each image is described three times before it is retired. Once an image is retired, the submitted descriptions are evaluated by library research staff who select the best description for each image. Each of the descriptions are then converted into alt-text (alternative text) which make its collections accessible to all users. Volunteers can help anonymously or create an account. The project includes a tutorial, instructions, tips and detailed metadata information about each work of art.

The Emigrant City project at the New York Public Library

The Emigrant City project is built using Scribe, an open source framework for setting up community transcription projects around handwritten or OCR-resistant texts. The goal of this project is to extract structured data from over 6,000 handwritten mortgage and bond ledgers from the Emigrant Savings Bank records. To divide the labor — and to help ensure accuracy — they’ve broken the work into 3 free-standing tasks. These tasks follow a sequence, but they can be performed independently.

Scribes of the Cairo Geniza

The Scribes of the Cairo Geniza is a Zooniverse project to transcribe 300,000 fragments of pre-modern and medieval Jewish texts—from everyday receipts to biblical works – from The Cairo Geniza. The first step of the project, is to sort the fragments by script type and level of difficulty. Next, we analyze the sorted piles by transcribing the relatively easy fragments, and by finding key phrases that will eventually be used to help decipher the more difficult ones. This is a collaborative project between many institutions of higher learning, several great manuscript repositories, and the citizens of the world.

NYPL Community Oral History Project Transcript Editor

The NYPL Community Oral History Project Transcript Editor is a community driven project to make accessible stories of New York City’s past and present. Today thousands of libraries and public media organizations publish large digital audio collections online. Most of these, however, lack transcripts or basic metadata, leaving them invisible to search engines and inaccessible to prospective users. Recent advances in speech-to-text technologies have made great progress in opening audio to the web, but the transcripts they produce are still error-prone and require careful human editing to reach full accuracy. Transcripts are important because they make audio content searchable online, and accessible to people with hearing disabilities. In order for audio to be made more accurately searchable, people and computers need to work together!