by Richard Laurin
Bonjour, Hello, Tansi, Aniin, She:kon,
In August 2021, Dr Cara Krmpotich wrote a post briefly outlining the current push to transform the GKS database into a more public-focused and inviting space to introduce the incredible knowledge and heritage items hosted on our digital platform.
These future upgrades will be developed gradually through an iterative process that requires regular testing. This is where we hope we can count on the GRASAC community to help us! We will need individuals who are willing to visit the site and provide feedback on their experience with the upgrades. Your participation can be catered to your interests and the amount to time you are able and willing to give to the project. For example, we will need people who are interested in testing things as simple as navigating from one section of the site to another and feedback on the ‘look and feel’ of the site. More advanced testing will focus on the search function, new interactive features, keyboard navigation and screen reader behaviour. If any of this sounds interesting to you (and I hope it does), please fill out our ‘GKS tester’ form and we will reach out shortly with more details on how you can help with this important work.
Website Upgrade Goals: Accessible, Intuitive and Inviting
The next generation of the GKS/GRASAC website aims to be a more accessible and intuitive website that can showcases the GKS heritage items in more compelling and diverse ways. Accessibility in this scenario represents upgrading the way the website responds to keyboard navigation, screen reader software and other components that are part of incorporating accessibility best practices into the site. For most sighted users, understanding a texts like a list, form, or menu is facilitated by visual cues. We will be reviewing the site for proper html element ‘tags’ so that screen reader software can properly identify these distinctions and label how the text is structured. These improvements will allow more visitors an equitable experience of the site by allowing screen reader users to make specific actions which greatly reduce the time spent searching for information.
Another important redevelopment goal is to make the site more intuitive. We plan to rethink how the site behaves based on who we hope will use it. To do so, we will need to make adjustments to how content is accessed and displayed. One of the strategies we are looking into is creating a new set of user ‘types’ that will allow the site to know how to customize its options to best suit specific user needs. Ultimately providing us the opportunity to open a version of the site to the public, while retaining advanced tools and display options for GRASAC members. We hope that minimizing complexity for the casual visitor while delivering powerful tools to more advanced users will make the site a more engaging space for everyone.
Last but certainly not least, we expect the redevelopment of the GKS/GRASAC websites to be more inviting to Indigenous community partners, researchers as well as new visitors to the site. We are currently investigating ways we may integrate automated site design changes based on seasonal shifts, ideas around maps as a collection search tool, as well as finding a more seamless way of combining the GKS database with the GRASAC website. One of our driving redesign imperatives on thinking about the heritage items as relatives and asking ourselves: “if I was creating a website for family members, how would I want them to be showcased and presented to my colleagues, community members and the larger public?”
I look forward to working on these important site upgrades and I sincerely hope you are inspired to participate in this process in any way you can. If you have any questions, comments or concerns about any of this, feel free to reach out and send me an email at: richarddlaurin@gmail.com.