The Free Internet Cafe for the Blind & Visually Impaired, the first in the whole of Africa, which opens the World Wide Web, making The Gambia a leading light in Africa, with this technology by allowing free and total access to surf the net send and receive emails and for students to enhace their studies with the aid of this pioneering software. No more do they need to rely on a third party to read to them newspapers, magazines, books, letters and world wide information. Nonvision.KingfisherGambia.com - British Library (expert)
 

British Library

British Library website (opens in new window "TYPE=PICT;ALT=")

Level: expert

What is the British Library?

The British library is an online collection of millions of books, articles, sound recordings, journals and much more. It is very useful for those studying, especially through higher education and distance learning.

How to use the British Library

On the homepage you will find several links, either in link form or through a drop-down box. These provide information about the library, what it is, how to search it and how it can be useful.

Near the top of the page there is also a search box, with various tick boxes underneath for you to choose what you wish to search and in what form.

If, for instance you search for "dog training" and leave all tick boxes checked, you will get search results from all categories. These can be navigated by heading, and the results page will show you the first five (if applicable) from each section, i.e journals, catalogue, gallery, with a link to see more results from that section if you wish.

Using "Dog training" as our example, on the results page we would see that the first group of results aren’t particularly helpful, they don’t specifically tell us about dog training. These are webpage results.

We can see this by reading the descriptions under each link, which tells us a little about what we would find were we to click the link.

Next we see gallery results, which again don’t help us much in this case, particularly as they are images!

The most useful results for this search, and probably many others are under the catalogues section. Here we see a variety of books on the topic researched – "dog training". However these either have to be read in one of the libraries reading rooms for free, in London, or purchased in print.

How useful is this website?

The websites navigation is easy enough, with headings and text navigation the best way to get around.

However, with so much of the content not actually available online it's hard to see how the British library can assist visually impaired users.

When opening articles, opening them in a new window brings up a html (website) copy of the document, which is often preferable to PDF’s, however the range of articles available is much less than the book selection and so it’s suggested that this website has limited use, but shouldn’t be discounted completely.

It is worth noting that the book results could then be taken and researched for accessibility with an organisation such as the RNIB, thus the British Library would provide the titles on the researched topic for the user then to find elsewhere. This, however, may just be a long way round of finding information!

 

The Free Internet Cafe for the Blind & Visually Impaired, the first in the whole of Africa, which opens the World Wide Web, making The Gambia a leading light in Africa, with this technology by allowing free and total access to surf the net send and receive emails and for students to enhace their studies with the aid of this pioneering software. No more do they need to rely on a third party to read to them newspapers, magazines, books, letters and world wide information.