News

Changes and Updates

Title II Outreach

With the announcement of revisions to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 2024, the LAA launched initiatives to reach out to e-resource vendors to assess their preparedness.

Accessibility is a critical issue for all library activities, but library publishing has a unique set of opportunities and challenges in this area, including web accessibility and production workflows. With ADA Title II regulations going into effect by the end of June, it is important for library publishers to understand what role they will play.

Changes and Updates

Nominations

Nominations for Steering Committee Co-Chair and Action Committee co-chair are open! Co-chairs serve staggered two year terms and are responsible for setting the quarterly Steering meeting agenda, leading Steering meetings, and communicating with the action committees. Anyone who has been with the LAA for at least one year is welcome to nominate themselves.

This session reports on a project between universities in Canada and the United States.

In fall 2022, the E-Resources Management Working Group of the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) published a guide to negotiating accessibility with vendors. The writers of the guide will share their key takeaways from the guide, strategies for advocating for accessibility with vendors, and their next steps for keeping this document relevant and useful to all libraries.

Volunteer Opportunity

The Library of Congress is creating accessible cataloging documentation for librarians. In order to make sure that the documentation can successfully interpret MARC coding via a screen reader, the Library of Congress is seeking volunteers who regularly use screen readers to help test the documentation (approximately 1 hour per volunteer).

The Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) joins the Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) as a partner to advance accessibility for library electronic resources, with the goal of providing equal access to information for all library users. FLVC represents 28 state colleges and 12 public universities in Florida.

The University System of Maryland & Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) joins the Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) as a partner to advance accessibility for library electronic resources, with the goal of providing equal access to information for all library users. USMAI is a consortium of seventeen academic libraries in the State of Maryland.

This webinar will provide an opportunity to share how accessibility was foundational to the development of the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries' new website, which launched in late 2022. The MSU team is committed to creating an accessible, inclusive, and responsive web presence for the MSU Libraries. They will share their design processes and tools used to develop an accessible and sustainable website.

We apologize for the incorrect PDF formatting on the original document, and thank the community for informing us so we may do better in the future.

Libraries are meant for everyone. While libraries have long claimed this to be true, exclusionary practices and inaccessible systems still exist and are extremely difficult to fully eradicate. The act of methodically creating a culture of accessibility hinges on each member of an organization as they seek to ask constructive questions and make decisions that pull the organization in a unified direction.

The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC) joins the Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) as a partner to advance accessibility for library electronic resources, with the goal of providing equal access to information for all library users.

This webinar walks through process of a high-level e-resource accessibility review from Michigan State University's Usability/Accessibility Research and Consulting.

Learn the language of web accessibility and how to apply and use it in your library websites and evaluations of e-resources.

This webinar is includes clips from Jay Dolmage's 2019 Keynote for the Big Ten Academic Alliance and a facilitated discussion regarding how libraries can be more aware and responsive to the needs of persons with disabilities when using physical library spaces.

This webinar will walk the audience through what is disability and how it is defined.  The session is interactive.  In this session you will learn about why disability laws are important, what libraries should think about in terms of their own accessibility for people with disabilities, and how compliance and accessibility are fundamentally different concepts.

Participants will expand their awareness of disability, learn to promote accessibility, and consider how to contribute to a positive climate through their beliefs, behaviors, and communications.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are meant to be as open and available as possible, but if they’re not accessible or on accessible platforms, how “open” are they really? In this webinar, staff from the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries will share how they’ve integrated accessibility into their OER initiatives and OER grant program to improve the accessibility of OER created at MSU.

This webinar will provide real-world case studies of the formation and impact of accessibility committees at two different university libraries. Presenters from the University of Minnesota and the University of Washington will offer the respective stories of their committees’ formation and advocacy efforts, in addition to discussing the successes, challenges, and horizons facing these kinds of working groups in academic libraries.

This webinar will provide an overview of the work being done as part of the Federated Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education (FRAME) grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.