Abstract
Sacramento State’s electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) collection faces a common problem: how to achieve 508 compliance, ensure accessibility for all users, and promote principles of universal design. Providing electronic collections and resources that are accessible to all users is an important part of promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion for our students and end users. In Spring 2020 we launched a new initiative to hire and train a single student employee focused on 508 remediation for approximately 600 previously digitized theses and projects, prior to their ingest in the institutional repository. When our campus closed due to the COVID‐19 pandemic in March 2020 we made the decision to expand this opportunity to more library student employees and provide a project they could work on remotely. By converting this to a remote work project, we were able to keep all student assistants employed who were interested in remote work, from nearly every department in the library. We were able to expand the scope of our remediation efforts, with the original project growing from all retrospectively digitized theses (approximately 1,000 in all) to all ETD content in the institutional repository (an additional 3,500).
Highlights
Sacramento State’s electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) collection faces a common problem: how to achieve 508 compliance, ensure accessibility for all users, and promote principles of universal design
The phrase 508 compliance refers to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a federal law requiring agencies to guarantee their electronic content is accessible to people with disabilities (Section508.gov, 2020)
Like most academic libraries surveyed by Anderson and Leachman (2020, p. 10) and Waugh et al (2020, p. 8) we had no institutional or local policy regarding the accessibility of content in our institutional repository
Summary
The University Library at Sacramento State has faced challenges with adopting and enacting policies supporting 508 compliance/accessibility in our institutional repository (IR). Accessibility of university-produced content, such as theses, had largely relied on selfreported 508 compliance by the depositors and remediation upon request. The University Library took the initiative to address the accessibility of content deposited in ScholarWorks, the institutional repository, which consists primarily of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Within the context of primarily text-based theses, our 508 compliance work is heavily focused on making content accessible to people who use screen readers. We believe that the Library has a responsibility to proactively make our ETD materials 508 compliant, rather than relying on users to agree to accessibility requirements they may not understand and that are conveyed within a much larger deposit agreement
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