eBooks, eJournals and accessibility.

Academic librarianship has turned from books and paper journals to content provided through electronic subscriptions to databases, indexes, journals and eBooks.

Part of the mission of any academic library is to provide the service to all members of the academic community. This includes providing access to those with any type of disability. Under the auspices of fulfilling requirements of the American's with Disabilities Act, I was charged with investigating accessibility to the libraries digital content.

With the assistance of Kenneth Elkind of the university's Adaptive Technology Lab, I began testing all databases and indexes of electronic content. This was done via the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE) FAE tests the HTML and other coding of web portals for screen reader accessibility. Results of testing where then compared by using a tester created rating system. Databases that received a failing or otherwise failing grade where then tested using the JAWS screen-reader and if deemed unaccessible, vendors where contacted so that links to accessible content or other solutions for accessibilty could be put in place. 


Digital content created by the university library was also investigated. EReserve material, which was generally PDFs created by library staff, was found to be unaccessible. At the time, library staff ran PDFs through Adobe Professional's accessibility function on demand for disabled students. The Adobe tagged content so that it could be read by screen readers. Testing these PDFs with JAWS and other leading screen readers found that any text within the tagged PDFs that was smudged or otherwise blurry was not tagged and therefore not accessible to screen-readers. As many PDFs where 2nd or greater generation scans, many supposedly accessible documents where not in fact readable by screen readers. 


I investigated the leading OCR software and upon deliberation with library and university staff, as well as members of the Universal Accessibility Interest Group, I found that ABBYY Finereader was the best scanning OCR/scanning software for the library's needs and am presently working to provide training and network access to this product for processing all library created PDFs so that they are screen-reader compliant.

Library administration and the campus disability office wanted to provide a screen-reader that could be made available to those in the university community that where not provided with one by the state or other disability services. This might include those with low-vision or learning disability that a reader designed for the blind would be difficult to operate. Investigation and conversation with colleagues led me to TextHelp's Read Write Gold product. Read Write Gold is not only a screen reader, but also a text-to-speech generator and gives users the ability to export PDF and other text sources to mp3. This additional functionality provides needed services for all members of the library community. I am presently working with library IT staff to provide a method for access to this program for both campus and distance learning members of the university community.