1. On 1/24/19, Access Medicine will be removing the
Calculators from the Quick Reference tabs. The Calculators received minimal
usage of 0.02% of traffic across all the Access sites, and are not WCAG
compliant. Furthermore, they have some inherent clinical utility issues. Many
of the calculators sought out by providers are not populated in our current
list of offerings, while others on the sites are simply outdated. Clinicians
typically utilize a point-of-care resource to quickly locate calculators when
they need them, or they are automatically calculated for them at the point of
care. Mercer used the calculators 105 times in all of 2017 and 31 times in all
of 2018. Please pass this information along to the appropriate parties.
2. Now users have the ability to highlight notes with new functionality
via Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is is an open source browser plug in that allows
users to quickly annotate and highlight content on any website including ours!
While this is a free tool for anyone to use anywhere on the internet, we save
our users an extra step by embedding it on our sites for ease of use.
Hypothes.is allows our users to collate any highlights or annotations they
gather across our Access products, and gather them together with the variety of
sources they use on a daily basis. Users will interact with Hypothes.is via a
Hypothes.is account, not MyAccess. Users have the ability to create private or
public annotations, as well as create private groups to share annotations with
others (e.g. study groups). Highlighting always defaults to private. Because
Hypothes.is is a browser based tool, it persists across multiple sessions. When
a user leaves Access and then returns to that piece of content the Hypothesi.is
tool reminds them of their notes.
A public annotation is visible to
anyone, but the link back to the source content respects paywalls; that is the
annotation is visible, including any highlighted text snippet, but any links
back to the source content will be subject to paywall settings. Users can tag
their annotations with key terms, allowing them to collate topics and refer
back to those notes more easily.
Hypothes.is also integrates with
common LMS (eg BB, Canvas) to allow for collaboration among faculty and
students.
3. Readspeaker is now available for Access Medicine book
content on the Access platform to help address the concern for effective
accessibility on the Access sites. Readspeaker provides online text to speech,
and is a web-based tool on our medical Access sites. The feature can be found
on all our book chapter pages at the beginning of each chapter section. As the
text is read aloud, the text is also highlighted for the user. Users can
control settings of the reader such as volume, reading speed, pause the
reading, and adjust the highlighting colors if they choose.
Note, the
Readspeaker settings are saved by session, and are not permanently saved to the
user via MyAccess. This feature sits behind the paywall, and is enabled on
mobile. The addition of Readspeaker helps us continue progress toward greater
Accessibility on the Access platform. |
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