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Accessibility and SLS

covers what SUNY Library Services is doing to address accessibility both internally and for SUNY

Library Accessibility plan

I've been asked to work on the library's section of the SUNY EIT Accessibility Plan. How do I start?

Topics

Answer

Each SUNY campus has been asked to develop an Accessibility Plan "to promote ongoing, inclusive access for individuals with disabilities." There is a library component to this plan where you will be asked to describe how you're currently reviewing and addressing accessibility for library services, and how you plan to perform ongoing maintenance, training, and assessment. 

Where do you start?

  • Each campus will handle the plan creation in its own way, but the campus EIT Officer is responsible for delivery of the first pass at the plan by June 30, 2020.
  • Here is the plan template, which can be modified and/or enhanced to fit the needs of your campus.

What's included in the Library section?

The library section includes the following lines: Authority & Responsibility, Awareness Raising, Design, Procurement, Monitoring Compliance, and Training. For each row, you are asked to fill in information about:

  • What you're going to do to meet the element (Actions)
  • Who's responsible for this action (Suggested Administrative Oversight)
  • What kind of financial support would you need to accomplish this action (Resources/Source for Resources)
  • What kind of measurable outcome are you hoping for (Outcome)
  • Where are you in the process of achieving this outcome (Progress) (See plan template for options)
  • Narrative description of what's going on with this action (Status Description)
  • When you plan to achieve your outcomes (Time Frame)

library accessibility chart, described in text above

Where does the content for this matrix come from?

  • Because the SUNY EIT Accessibility Committees have already come up with Accessibility Standards for each content area, including Libraries, you can start by reviewing the Library Accessibility Guidelines (LAG) document.
  • The LAG document goes through each Library Standard and notes whether or not it's required or strongly recommended, what it means, why it matters, how to implement it, and how to test it
  • Before you start working on your library plan, it's important to do an audit of what you're already doing in your library to meet the accessibility standards. Anything that you haven't done yet should go into the plan, and you should note what you've already achieved.
  • Because the standards are already designed as action items, you could take them right from the LAG document and put them into the plan, for example: "Provide access, resource, and service information on a library accessibility web page or relevant section of the library’s website" could go in the Authority and Responsibility section as an action; the library webmaster could go under Administrative Oversight; nothing in the resources section unless you needed to hire someone to help with this; the Outcome would be creation of this page; Progress would be one of the following: No Activity, Planning, Developing, Operational, or Accomplished/ongoing; Status Description would cover what you've done or plan to do; and Time Frame would be when you finished this or when you plan to finish this.
  • Note that not all of the Standards have to be included separately in your plan. You may want to create an umbrella action that includes several standards. For example, for the Digital Content standard, you could put both "Perform high quality source document scans" and "When scans for instructional and research materials are requested (e.g., course reserves, ILL), conduct basic OCR scans (text-renderable). Purchasing a new digital document, physical book, or processing by an external vendor may be required to achieve basic accessibility" under the same "Investigate improved document scanning capabilities to meet user scanning needs" action
  • You could create a Responsibility Task Sheet to use internally in order to keep track of who in the library is responsible for what piece of the plan.

What's next?

Creating the plan can help you organize how you want to pursue accessibility in the library, but how do you move forward with achieving your action items?

  • Start with low-hanging fruit. For example, have you created an accessibility web page on your library site? If not, that would be a good place to start. Do you have a way for library users to submit accessibility concerns? You could add a form to the footer in your webpages and accomplish that action item.
  • Each library is different in terms of staffing, access to your web content, etc., and each library will need to pursue accessibility action items in ways that work best for them. Prioritization of tasks may look different in different campus libraries.
  • If you've already achieved many of the standards, take time to consider how can you ensure that you'll continue to improve access for your users.
  • Not everything in the plan can be achieved in one year; this is an ongoing process. It's good to hit the highest risk areas first, with plans to achieve more goals in the next years.
  • These plans are expected to be living documents and presidents will annually share progress with the Chancellor.

See the files link for a draft version of the SLS's library piece of the Systems Administration EIT Plan.