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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! My work would not be possible without great folks like you in the workplace). In the past few months, we have created some internal guidelines and are aiming to publish our first 100% accessible digital collection in the coming weeks, with one of our student media publications as the guinea pig.

We are working this new piece into our existing workflow, and will be a part of all new projects. We are still assessing the collections that are currently up online and coming up with ideas to process these files, but are happy to find something to work into production with an additional time commitment to run the accessibility check.

The next step will be to address audio-visual materials, but since we create more textual content than any other types of media, we opted to start there. More on this as we continue to work towards compliancy.

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