[Eril-l] Accessibility and local digital archival materials

[Kate Reagor]

Archival and primary source resource are tough to bring into full compliance. We ran into this issue at the Texas State Library with our subscription to HeritageQuest - there's really no way to make thousands of census records fully transcribed and accessible. We ended up working with the vendor to make sure the platform and text content was brough up to WCAG 2.0 standards, and requested an exception for the remaining inaccessible content. You can see a copy of our exception request documentation at https://www.tsl.texas.gov/sites/default/files/public/tslac/texshare/TexShare_Databases/HeritageQuestOnline-exceptionpacket-20190422_Redacted.pdf

Depending on your university and state accessibility policies, you might be able to request an exception (https://www.section508.gov/buy/determine-ict-exceptions). For these kinds of resources, they would most likely fall under "Undue Burden or Fundamental Alteration". It's also necessary to offer an alternate method of offering access to this information (for instance, patrons may request assistance from a librarian).

It's important to note that in our case, since we're licensing the resource for statewide use, the exception only applied to the state library - not to our members. Any member library that acquires the resource through our program must also look at their local policies and regulations and request an exception for themselves.

____________________________________
Kate Reagor, MSIS
Library Technical Services Specialist
Texas State Library and Archives Commission
texshare at tsl.texas.gov<mailto:texshare at tsl.texas.gov> | kreagor at tsl.texas.gov<mailto:kreagor at tsl.texas.gov>

From: Eril-l <eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org> On Behalf Of Molly Beisler
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 4:36 PM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: [Eril-l] Accessibility and local digital archival materials

Have any other libraries successfully made the argument that digital archival materials shouldn't be held to the same accessibility standards as contemporary content? I know that this is only tangentially an e-resource topic, but we're having trouble finding other libraries that have dealt this issue, so we're trying to cast a wide net.

At the University of Nevada, Reno, all software purchased on campus is subject to accessibility review, and we are currently in discussions about whether digital objects in Islandora need to meet the same accessibility requirements as, say, the campus website and LMS. There's both the question of more recent born digital materials, like born-digital PDFs or Word documents, and digitized manuscript content that has never been transcribed, and where it's necessarily feasible to transcribe it. For videos and audio recordings, providing transcripts is a workable solution, but the documents are more challenging. We will be trying to make the argument that historical archival materials are quite different than resource such as PDFs of journal articles on course reserves, and that different standards should apply.

Does anyone have experience with handling accessibility issues like this for online archival content, or any documentation about it? Or does anyone have statements about accessibility and digitally accessible archival content that we might look at as a model that we could use?

Any examples, thoughts, or advice would be appreciated!

Thanks,
   Molly Beisler
   Interim Director of Technical Services and Head of Discovery Services
   University of Nevada, Reno Libraries

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