Events

Accessibility is a critical issue for all library activities, but library publishing has a unique set of opportunities and challenges in this area, including web accessibility and production workflows. With ADA Title II regulations going into effect by the end of June, it is important for library publishers to understand what role they will play. The Library Publishing Coalition and the Library Accessibility Alliance will co-host a webinar on this topic on Tuesday, June 18, at 12 p.m. Eastern time.

This session reports on a project between universities in Canada and the United States. The purpose of the project was to investigate and prototype the possibilities that the Ex Libris library services platform allows to improve access to digital accessible books, in EPUB, PDF and DAISY formats. 

In fall 2022, the E-Resources Management Working Group of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) published a guide to negotiating accessibility with vendors. The writers of the guide will share their key takeaways from the guide, strategies for advocating for accessibility with vendors, and their next steps for keeping this document relevant and useful to all libraries. Access the TRLN Guide to Negotiating Accessibility in E-Resource Licenses (PDF).

This webinar will provide an opportunity to share how accessibility was foundational to the development of the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries' new website, which launched in late 2022. The MSU team is committed to creating an accessible, inclusive, and responsive web presence for the MSU Libraries. They will share their design processes and tools used to develop an accessible and sustainable website. These processes involved constantly engaging with the members from Libraries’ Accessibility Working Group and the Libraries’ Accessibility Coordinator on a bi-weekly basis to demonstrate, receive feedback, and get guidance on the accessibility questions that came up during development.

Libraries are meant for everyone. While libraries have long claimed this to be true, exclusionary practices and inaccessible systems still exist and are extremely difficult to fully eradicate. The act of methodically creating a culture of accessibility hinges on each member of an organization as they seek to ask constructive questions and make decisions that pull the organization in a unified direction. In an attempt to infuse accessibility into the culture at the University of Virginia Library, the library used a collaborative process to establish and adopt a system of four design principles. If exclusionary practices and inaccessible systems can be designed, we can learn to recognize them, so they can be redesigned. Using these design principles as organizational values to guide conversations can mean less time establishing a shared understanding of the problems at hand, and thus lead to more focused, effective, and inclusive solutions. This process seeks to help empower individuals and departments to act in ways in which they can engage in real change.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are meant to be as open and available as possible, but if they’re not accessible or on accessible platforms, how “open” are they really? In this webinar, staff from the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries will share how they’ve integrated accessibility into their OER initiatives and OER grant program to improve the accessibility of OER created at MSU. In order to hopefully implement similar OER accessibility processes at their libraries, attendees can expect to learn about OER accessibility resources, MSU Libraries’ OER accessibility checklist & grant program accessibility requirements, MSU Libraries’ staff who work on OER accessibility, MSU Libraries’ OER accessibility evaluation workflow & procedures, specific OER accessibility challenges/issues and OER accessibility tips and lessons learned.