Updates made to UCI Thesis Manual not reflected in template

[librarianinja]

@lotten @galbraic @GaelNguyen @sriki18 @mbezaire @mbovyn @onlycparra @bbelleville @xguse @alkalifly @drewfrank @computersforpeace (apologies for all the tagging, but I'm not sure how best to reach you folks)

Hello, I'm a librarian at UC Irvine Libraries with a very limited understanding of LaTeX. Thank you for the work you've done keeping this template current! There have been some recent updates to the official UCI Thesis & Dissertation Formatting Manual, and I am hoping one or more of you will be able to update the template accordingly. My notes are below.

Preliminaries

Issue: URLs appear in a different font than the rest of the preliminary pages
Possible solution: \urlstyle{same}

Issue: % Your name as it appears on official UCI records.
Update to: % This does not have to be the name listed with the UCI Registrar's Office. However, it should match the name you are using when you submit your thesis in ProQuest.

uci-manual

Issue: The manual has been updated several times since it was added to the template. While it's nice to have, recreating the content of the entire manual and keeping it current (especially when more edits are expected in the near future, including a new Accessibility section) seems like a lot of work.
Possible solution: Instead of including the manual content, would you instead considering linking to the current version of the manual? https://guides.lib.uci.edu/gradmanual/home

Accessibility

I understand that it is a challenge to make a LaTeX document that will export into an accessible PDF. Are there any ways to improve on this? In particular, it would be great if there was a way to:

• prompt for alt text descriptions of figures and images
• create a title/heading structure that will persist in the pdf export
• include clear headers for tables
  This page may be helpful: Digital Accessibility of LaTeX by University of South Carolina

Please feel free to contact me at cacullen@uci.edu with any questions.

[librarianinja]

Regarding accessibility, it sounds like the LaTeX Tagging Project might be the most straightforward solution at this time. Are any of the contributors willing to have a conversation about these requested updates? I understand that you folks are busy but it would be really helpful to hear from someone with some LaTeX expertise even if you are not available to make these updates yourself. Thanks.

[lotten]

Thanks for reaching out! I was able to make the first two suggested edits fairly easily with GitHub's built-in editor. I also updated the main readme file to link to the latest official Manual and can look into removing the version included here.

Regarding accessibility, I'm afraid I have neither the time nor the expertise (haven't touched LaTeX in more than a decade) to investigate -- sorry! So like other changes in the past, it will have to rely on contributions by others.

[librarianinja]

Thank you so much for your edits! I greatly appreciate your help. No worries about the accessibility part -- I realize that is going to take a lot of work, so I've reached out to some folks from our computer science department for assistance. Thanks again, lotten!

[librarianinja]

@lotten one last thing -- would you please resynchronize the Overleaf template with GitHub? It still shows that it was last updated 5 years ago. Thank you!

[lotten]

@librarianinja that Overleaf template was actually not created by me, despite my name being listed, and I don't have access to update/refresh it. Even worse, I can't tell from the site who the owner is... :(

[librarianinja]

Thanks for letting me know. I will try to track down the other listed authors.