Open with Purpose: Open Access Week 2020
Permanent link for Open With Purpose: Where are we working to improve accessibility in GVSU Open Access collections? on October 22, 2020
Open Access means more than “free”. Our earlier posts this week highlight successes, where Open Access and library publishing initiatives are working to reduce inequities and make the scholarly conversation more inclusive. Today, we’re reflecting on accessibility, an area where library publishers know we can do better, and discussing how we aim to improve here at GVSU.
Conversations about access to information, including Open Access conversations, often focus on paywalls and similar financial barriers, but these are not the only sources of inequity and exclusion in scholarly publishing. The (in)accessibility of digital information, specifically for screen readers and other assistive technologies, is a significant obstacle to a genuinely inclusive, equitable academic community. In an ideal scenario, assistive technologies can provide an audio version of an electronic journal article or book, making the content of that text available to someone with limited or impaired vision. However, this ideal is only possible when the characters in the text can be correctly identified by the assistive device, and when visual elements of a page or document are machine-readable. The former is increasingly easy to achieve automatically, but the latter requires human time and effort to implement, especially after a document is created. Allocating the resources to do this is a challenge for any organization, and frankly, we could be doing much better.
Accessibility is a major priority for GVSU, and both the university and the Libraries as a whole are continuing to improve accessibility of the university’s webpages, videos, and course content in Blackboard. But as with many other academic institutions and publishers, our library publishing and Open Access services have room to improve accessibility in the documents we publish. We’ve been thinking and talking about our accessibility challenges over the last few years, but have not made as much forward progress as we hoped.
Inspired by this year’s Open Access Week theme of building more inclusive and equitable publishing systems, we are publicly releasing a Roadmap to Improved Accessibility for our library publishing and Open Access content. Additionally, over the coming year we will be working to produce fully accessible versions of our GVSU-authored OER as part of a 1-year pilot of the PressbooksEDU publishing platform.
These actions represent a small step forward; we are not yet near the end of the beginning of our accessibility journey. And much of what we are able to do will depend on changes beyond our control, as Grand Valley and the state of Michigan continue to navigate the uncertainty of a global pandemic and (eventually) its aftermath. We can’t predict how far we’ll be able to go, but we can take a step forward, and that’s a start.
