New White Paper: “The Law and Accessible Texts: Reconciling Civil Rights and Copyrights”

Update August 10, 2019 UVa Project Aims To Ease Book Access For People With Disabilities (via The Daily-Progress)

New From ARL and the University of Virginia Library:

On July 22, 2019, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the University of Virginia (UVA) Library released this white paper, The Law and Accessible Texts: Reconciling Civil Rights and Copyrights, authored by Brandon Butler (UVA), Prue Adler (ARL), and Krista Cox (ARL).

This white paper, part of a project supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, analyzes how institutions of higher education can meet their mission of providing all students with equitable access to information within the current legal framework. Ensuring access to research and learning materials is critical in protecting the civil rights of people with disabilities.

Direct to Full Text White Paper: The Law and Accessible Texts: Reconciling Civil Rights and Copyrights

See Also: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Awards $1,000,000 Grant to “Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education” Project (January 11, 2019)

The population of students with disabilities at institutions of higher education has increased substantially over the past few decades and many of those have print disabilities, including the largest subgroup, those with learning disabilities. Students with print disabilities require text that has been reformatted for screen readers, text-to-speech software, or other forms of audio delivery, often with human intervention. Universities have few staff to do that work. Without collaboration across campuses, wasted effort and delayed service are certain.

“Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education” is a two-year project newly funded by a $1,000,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University of Virginia which aims to address this problem. Led by University Librarian John Unsworth, this project will reduce duplication of remediation efforts across participating universities, allow the cumulative improvement of accessible texts, and decrease the turnaround time for delivering those texts to students and faculty.

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