Jane Hughes

Creating an accessible digital record viewer

Supporting the digitisation of records by researching accessible image viewers

Overview

To support The National Archive's (TNA) digitisation project, we helped them identify the most suitable IIIF viewer to use for showcasing digital archives, by balancing user needs and organisational priorities.

Key responsibilities

  • Researching options for technical and practical feasibility, taking complex requirements into account
  • Shortlisting options and proposing recommendations
  • Prioritising well documented tools to support future development
  • Ensure the work is done in alignment with service standards, to support future assessments

The challenge

The National Archives were working on an internal initiative to increase awareness of their record collections and make them more accessible to the general public, since currently viewing archives requires visiting the archives in person, which is a hindrence for many users who may live far away or have specific access needs. TNA had already begun digitising records and making them available to view online via a digital image viewer, but they needed help creating a new, more accessible version as part of their wider website re-build.

The task

This challenge came with complex requirements and security and privacy concerns. They needed to mitigate the risk of records being stolen or shared without consent, as well as manage potentially sensitive content within the records. Their audience was diverse with a large age range, so we knew the viewer needed to be usable by people with a wide range of technical ability, knowledge and requirements. The existing viewer was not accessible, with limited keyboard-only access, so it was important to prioritise this in the new version.

Our key focus areas for the viewer were:

  • Making sure it was usable and intuitive for users with varying levels of digital competency
  • Meet WCAG AA standards
  • Support sensitive or restricted content
  • Be technically feasible for TNA's team to support longer term

Limitations

The budget was limited so we were unable to test with real users as part of our prototyping, instead relying on accessibility testing against WCAG criteria, and consulting with internal user researchers to ensure we were evaluating against previous user concerns.

A key part of our initial research involved managing expectations and negotiating the balance of stakeholder goals while advocating for users and accessibility. We anticipated users may be unfamiliar with the interface and could be viewing records on public or shared devices, so we prioritised simple, intuitive interfaces, keyboard compatibility and the ability to secure records via password protection.

Actions

I led a requirement gathering workshop with another developer to gather insights from key TNA stakeholders, including the product manager, user researchers and record managers. This was a really helpful session as there were a lot of varied requirements from different departments, so it was important that everyone had visibility of these, so we could decide priorities together.

Key actions included:

  • Familiarising myself with IIIF viewers as I hadn't worked with them before
  • Researching existing IIIF image viewers and comparing features
  • Collating a shortlist of viewers which met minimum requirements
  • Prioritised recommendations based on technical feasibility, customisation options, strength of documentation and potential for expanding functionality
  • Prototyping viewers for comparison

We collated our findings into a simple spreadsheet comparing each option. We presented the sheet to the project team with our recommendations, prioritised for accessibility, technical feasibility and ongoing maintenance. I knew that TNA had limited in-house development support, so the image viewer needed thorough, easily understandable documentation and minimal ongoing maintenance.

I produced IIIF image viewer prototypes, to showcase the strengths and drawbacks of each and allow stakeholders to use and test them against the requirements.

Outcome

The team selected Universal Viewer to move into further development, and although it had limitations around customisation, its strong accessibility support and documentation made it the best fit.