JISC Shares Findings From Survey About Accessibility of Ebook Platforms

A recent blog post from JISC in the UK shared findings of a survey looking at, “accessibility issues with ebook platform providers” from the end-user perspective. The authors of the blog post do note that it took about nine months for the results of the survey to be tabulated and, “so some of the platform details may have been upgraded in the last 9 months.”
From the JISC Tech Dis Blog:

Sarah Hilderley and Alistair McNaught contacted 13 of the bigger providers (who would have a presence in many universities or colleges) and asked them to complete a simple survey asking about accessibility from an end-user perspective. For a variety of reasons (including job changes) it has been difficult to collate the results until recently so some of the platform details may have been upgraded in the last 9 months but this can be regarded as a snapshot of platform accessibility at the beginning of the year.
Seven of the 13 contacted responded by providing data. We commend the following for their active honest engagement. Thankyou to our 7 honest dealers; ACLS Humanities E-Book; Gale/Cengage; EBL (ebrary); EBSCO; Elsevier; Emerald Insight and Ingram. Cambridge University Press were in the middle of a redesign with enhanced accessibility so felt that results from existing platform would be unrepresentative. This seemed a fair reason. But we were disappointed in the non response from the other 5 big names.

Survey Themes

1. Appearance and visual elements
2. Navigation and information
3. Tools testing and discovery
Read the Complete Blog Post with Survey Findings

Filed under: Data Files, EBSCO, Elsevier, Gale, News