Improving Accessibility of Electronic Course Reserve PDFs to Users with Disabilities at Hunter College Library
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5860/ital.v45i2.17502Keywords:
digital accessibilty, PDFs, print disabilities, optical character recognition, OCR, scanned PDFs, course materials, Americans with Disabilities Act, ABBY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat Pro, tagging, accessibility law, accessibility requirements, e-reservesAbstract
By April 2027 and 2028, institutions covered by Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act are expected to be legally required to ensure that digital content created or used at the institution is accessible as defined by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. The new law strongly emphasizes accessibility of course materials—including PDFs. This case study demonstrates how an R2 academic library staff can enhance the accessibility of PDF course materials by improving the accessibility of electronic reserves (e-reserves) PDFs at Hunter College Library (HCL).
Processes described here can be adapted by other libraries. Supporting campuses’ work to make course readings accessible may be a natural role for academic libraries. Locating or procuring the best quality version of a text available to the institution is a critical task for which libraries are optimally equipped. Furthermore, when readings are available only in print format, libraries can create higher-quality scans than those typically produced when the task is left to individual faculty members.
HCL began improving the accessibility of e-reserves PDFs in 2020. This article shares the knowledge acquired, established processes, limitations, and future directions. The workflow comprises checking each e-reserves reading. For those deemed poor, we locate an HCL collection or open access copy, purchase a digital copy, or remediate. Remediation involves optical character recognition (OCR), fixing errors therein, correcting reading order, removing repetitive headers and footers, and tagging. Literature the authors found on libraries proactively correcting OCR and tagging PDFs—that is, preceding a user’s request—was sparse, with the exceptions of the University of Toronto and the University of Michigan. Literature about proactively doing so for e-reserves was even narrower. This case study is intended to help fill the gap.
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