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Showing posts from January, 2018

Accessibility requirements and digital collections

So, I have found recently it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks- For the first time in too long, I tackled an area that was completely new to me and have been diving into the world of accessibility requirements for digital objects. In part, this is coming as a response to a newer policy in place at Kent State addressing electronic and information technology accessibility . Or for other digital librarians, a colleague at another university said "OCR'd PDFs just aren't going to cut it anymore". This statement I think reflects how many of us have practiced a simple approach to textual documents in the past. Batch run OCR before ingestion, and TADA! Done, or at least we had hoped. But, as I have come to learn, this approach is does not fair well for screen readers or adapt for those with vision impairments. At Kent State, I've been fortunate to have some great folks in the Accessibility Office to offer advice and hands-on training (Thank you, Jason Piatt!