Auditing the accessibility of electronic resources.

Abstract

Since the UK’s 2001 Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (SENDA, 2001), academic libraries have had a legal duty to provide all students with information in a form accessible to them, an obligation strengthened by the 2010 Equality Act (c15). Crucially, the latter duty covered readers with all kinds of impairments, not just visual impairment, and thus covers a huge range of needs for an enormous number of individuals. Libraries have put a huge amount of time and effort into providing documents in accessible format (alt-format) but obviously it is preferable for both libraries and readers if the documents are accessible as supplied from the publisher. Electronic resources have the potential to address many of the accessibility needs of our readers, but concerns have been growing in the HE sector (see, for instance, JISCTechdis, 2013) that the way in which e-resources are delivered actually renders them, in some cases, less accessible. This paper describes a project undertaken by the University of Bradford library to systematically assess the accessibility of our electronic resources, and gives recommendations for others wishing to do the same.