It’s March, which means the ADA Title II deadline for large institutions is looming near. I’m mainly the South and Southeast Asia librarian here at Michigan State, but I also spend roughly 25% of my time on accessibility, meaning that Title II is top of mind for me right now.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects people with disabilities from discrimination. In places like libraries, this means making collections and services available and accessible to all users. The ADA has been in place since 1990—it isn’t new—but there have been some recent changes, especially with regard to electronic resources, that we’ve been paying attention to.
I plan to talk about my own experiences here, so note that this post isn’t an all-inclusive guide. For more on Title II and libraries that isn’t from me, see these other articles and resources:
- ADA Title II and Academic Libraries, Library Accessibility Alliance
- ADA Title II regulations: implications for libraries, Association of Research Libraries
- New ADA Rules Explained, American Library Association
- How Changes to ADA Title II Impact Libraries – And What We Can Do to Respond, The Scholarly Kitchen
Electronic Resources Accessibility
At MSU, one facet of our response to Title II has been focusing on web accessibility. This means making sure that library users can access, read, and use library webpages and other electronic materials. Perhaps the most obvious example is making sure that screen readers can properly process webpages, but this covers a lot more, including captions on videos, color contrast in diagrams, and more.
And this doesn’t cover only library webpages; it includes anything that the library links to, meaning databases and other sorts of electronic materials. While the accessibility team as a whole has been focusing on much more than just e-resources vendors, this has been my big focus: trying to get language about accessibility into our licenses, ideally covering what would happen if a library user finds that a resource is inaccessible.
The BTAA’s Library Accessibility Working Group has some sample license language to use with vendors, which is what we start with. Then comes a process of negotiation, taking into account many factors including how critical a resource is and what, exactly, the vendor wants to change about our originally proposed license language. Lately, we’ve ended some negotiations by agreeing to revised license language and informing vendors that we’ll be revisiting accessibility when it comes time to renew a product.
The second part of all this negotiation is keeping track of the licenses and other information about accessibility that the vendor provides, such as a specific contact person or a VPAT. To do this, we’re storing information in our ILS. We use FOLIO, which is not without its hiccups but has been very useful for our purposes. In FOLIO, we’ve been able to create internal fields where we can record different types of accessibility information including current license terms. This is helpful when a remediation request does come up: we can easily check on our options instead of searching through multiple different people’s inboxes.
International Vendors
I have contacted a fair number of US-based vendors, who are aware of the changes to the ADA, but, because of the other 75% of my job, I have also taken on contacting international vendors. The ADA is an American law, but there are analogous laws in other regions, one of which is the European Accessibility Act (EAA). This act also covers online accessibility and applies to all of the European Union, so it has been useful to refer to when talking to vendors.
Of course, we also have vendors that are located neither in the US nor the EU, and negotiating with them often involves a back and forth. Being able to point to both the ADA and the EAA has been helpful in explaining to vendors why working on accessibility is important and how many potential customers this impacts.
How it’s Going
These sorts of conversations and negotiations are not something we started recently. We’ve been doing very similar work for years, going through our high-impact vendors, but the changes to the ADA have heightened our focus. Comparing recent responses to those from a few years ago, particularly from international vendors, there has been a marked shift. Many more vendors are receptive to discussing accessibility and to including accessibility in license language. There have even been vendors who refused to add in anything about accessibility a few years ago that have now accepted our proposed language without comment.
I won’t pretend that this hasn’t been a lot of work, both figuring out where licenses and subscriptions stand and then working with each individual vendor, but I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made. Most importantly, this directly impacts users, making library resources accessible and more usable for all, both those with disabilities and those without.
Are you also working on reactions to Title II at your library? How have things been going? Do you have any tips that you’d like to share?