Toward accessible course content: Challenges and opportunities for libraries and information systems

Abstract

The population of students with disabilities in postsecondary institutions is significant and rising. The U.S. Department of Education reports that 11% of students, or more than two million students, in post-secondary education report having a disability. Providing accessible versions of materials for courses is a core service of disability-services offices in schools. Finding, obtaining, or generating accessible course content is a challenging process for disability-services providers at institutions ranging from community colleges to research universities, many of which receive hundreds of individualized requests for content each semester. Although a range of sources and services to assist in this process have emerged, they are insufficient and inefficient because they keep people from working together on a complex, shared problem. In the summer of 2015, we conducted a qualitative study of the challenges facing disability services providers in U.S. postsecondary institutions, in order to design and implement information systems that would enable large-scale sharing of locally improved, accessible course content with qualified students in the U.S. This paper reports on the subset of our findings that addresses challenges to providing, sharing, and reusing accessible digital content. Our findings suggest that there are substantial opportunities for the LIS and library communities to apply our expertise to this gap in information services for an expanding population of students.

Evaluation of a Digital Library: An Experimental Study

“…Model denotes the conjectural features of a document such as semantic content, hyperlinked logical structure and external features. In contrast, format identifies the core document depiction such as rich text format (RTF), PDF and DOC (Fenlon et al, 2016).…”

FRAME: Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education A new collaborative framework

“…Accessible Course Content", around the issues regarding the provision of accessible materials in higher education. That work resulted both in an article, "Toward Accessible Course Content: Challenges and opportunities for libraries and information systems [2]", published in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology in December 2016, and an extensive white paper, "Libraries: Take AIM! Accessible Instructional Materials and Higher Education [3]", published in March 2017.…”

Collaborating to improve access of video for all

“…Case studies providing examples of successful workflows addressing captioning services for physical media materials are hard to find. There has been limited research on the potential for library support for increasing the quantity of accessible course content and for the implementation of metadata and other tools to support discovery of accessible instructional materials (Fenlon et al, 2016).…”