FRAME: Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education A new collaborative framework - IOS Press

Abstract:  Most colleges and universities offer services at their institution for students with disabilities who cannot properly utilize the standard available resources. Often the student needing the remediated resource does not obtain it until the semester is up and running, putting them significantly behind the other students in the course. This paper discusses a multi-institutional project at the University of Virginia that was established to address this problem. With a four-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University initiated an effort to create a web-based infrastructure allowing Disability Services Offices to safely share remediated texts for qualified recipeints, in order to reduce their nationwide duplication of effort, and thereby make it possible for the staff in these offices to achieve better outcomes for students in higher education. Many books, articles, videos, and other resources are often inaccessible or not sufficiently accessible to people with perceptual, cognitive, physical, or other disabilities. A significant percentage of the population has disabilities such as blindness, low vision, dyslexia, deafness, motor impairments, and other conditions that make it difficult or impossible for them to fully perceive and consume many resources to the extent people without those disabilities can. Colleges and universities are required by law to provide accessible versions of resources that their students with these disabilities need. Unfortunately, many published resources are not yet provided by their publishers in fully-accessible forms. This requires what is known as remediation: acquiring a publication in some available format and altering it to make it accessible, typically for a single individual needing a particular type of remediation. For example, a blind person may need markup added to a digital resource such as a PDF or an EPUB to enable proper navigation with a screen reader, as well as providing image descriptions for images that lack them.