[Eril-l] NISO Approves Working Group to Develop Standard Metadata for Remediation of Content for Accessibility

[Electronic Resources in Libraries discussion list]

**Apologies for cross posting**


Baltimore, MD—June 14, 2023—Voting members of the National Information
Standards Organization (NISO) have approved the formation of a Working
Group to refine and extend the metadata model developed in the Federating
Repositories of Accessible Material for Education (FRAME) project, which
will enable it to meet broader accessibility needs. NISO is currently
seeking members from across the information community to join the resulting
Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Working Group.



People with disabilities—blindness, low vision, dyslexia, deafness, motor
impairments, and other conditions—often require accommodations to fully
access educational materials such as books, journals, audiovisual content,
and other content. On college and university campuses, where these
accommodations are required by law, university Disability Services Offices
(DSOs) are typically responsible for the remediation—the process of making
the appropriate alterations to ensure accessibility for a particular
user—of educational materials. Remediation can be a labor-intensive
process, conducted at the level of the individual institution, resource,
and user. Should a student on one campus require access to a text already
sufficiently remediated by another institution, the work is typically
duplicated. This can mean that the same work is redone scores or even
hundreds of times across colleges and universities.

Recognizing the need for a solution facilitating the discoverability of
remediated works, a group of universities developed FRAME. Funded by a
grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the FRAME project indexes
remediated texts across repositories and enables sharing with authorized
users. The FRAME metadata model was developed to make these texts more
discoverable and to describe them consistently, providing detailed
information on the type of remediations made.

NISO will further develop and refine FRAME’s work with Accessibility
Remediation Metadata (ARM) for remediated texts. The ARM model will ensure
that the metadata is machine processable, provide written documentation,
and develop a metadata schema. This work will expand the FRAME model to
serve a wider range of needs, including those of publishers as well as
libraries and DSOs, and make remediated texts even more discoverable.

Working group co-chair Bill Kasdorf, Principal, Kasdorf and Associates,
states, “We are eager to move to the NISO community process, which will
include a broad range of stakeholders, to analyze the metadata model
developed in FRAME to ensure it is fit for purpose by many parties involved
in accessibility remediation, and to put it through the ANSI/NISO
standardization process.”

“We are excited to build on the work of FRAME,” says Nettie Lagace, NISO
Associate Executive Director. “Standardizing the ARM will help ensure that
it is easier to provide users with disabilities equal access to educational
content, and NISO is proud to support and enable this work.”

For more information and to volunteer to join the ARM Working Group, please
contact  nisohq at niso.org.

About NISO

Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster
discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through
collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional
communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries,
publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support
learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization,
management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting
communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information
standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American
National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO
website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq at niso.org.


NISO

3600 Clipper Mill Road, Suite 302

Baltimore, MD 21211

Phone: 301.654.2512

E-mail: nisohq at niso.org
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