Universal Accessibility Interest Group

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last person joined: 19 hours ago 

Charge: Offers librarians, support staff, students, and other advocates networking and collaboration opportunities, information sharing and programming to promote accessibility in academic libraries, including web accessibility, assistive technology, reference and instruction for users with disabilities and captioning processes.
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  • 1.  Experiences working with vendors

    Posted Feb 06, 2023 09:58 AM
    Hello UAIG!

    This month, we would love to hear about your experiences working with library vendors. A big portion of our jobs as librarians is contracting with outside vendors to acquire the resources our community needs- but often these vendors aren't thinking about accessibility. Further, legal precedent has made it clear that it's libraries' responsibility to choose vendors with accessible products. This creates an interesting and sometimes difficult dynamic that really requires us to build strong relationships with our vendors.

    What good experiences have you had with vendors around accessibility?
    What do you think you brought to the interaction that set it up for success?
    What did the vendor do that you really appreciated?
    ---
    For myself, I've had experiences that run the spectrum! The best experiences with vendors have been when it's clear they have already been thinking about accessibility. They have workflows and people dedicated to addressing shortcomings in their public-facing systems or products. Even these best experiences rarely include vendors updating inaccessible content with accessible replacements, which I continue to find disappointing.

    On my end, the best experiences have been when I had concrete ideas beforehand about how I wanted the interaction to go. For example, telling the vendor what file format I wanted the accessible version in. Or, working with colleagues to decide what acceptable turnaround times for vendors are, and what we'll all do if those aren't met. Creating an escalation pathway like this helped us all respond the same way, but also helped me stick to a timeline instead of taking answers like "we're working on it!" at face value.

    How about you?

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    Anaya Jones She/Her/Hers
    ___
    Accessibility & Online Learning Librarian
    Northeastern University
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  • 2.  RE: Experiences working with vendors

    Posted Feb 17, 2023 01:00 PM

    Your question is quite timely, Anaya! Just in the past two weeks I have had what I am considering some great successes working with vendors on accessibility!

    As part of our licensing and renewals processes, I contact vendors every year to request a current VPAT and some vendors consistently respond with some variation on "we don't have the money available to focus on accessibility" or even sometimes "we've never been asked for this before". I'm sure many of you do that same and get the same response. Well, I think we are collectively getting through! One vendor told me that as they are getting more and more requests for a VPAT, they plan to start working on one and hope to have it by the end of the year. Another, just emailed me this morning to report that they had fixed a specific problem that I had reported to them, and that they are working on fixing another. This was a complete turnaround from last year when they said they didn't have the money to test and remediate. As I was writing this, I just got another email from them asking me to send them a prioritized list and actually suggested I be their "VPAT expert" as they do not have on in house! Sigh.

    Another success was with a new resources for which I am currently negotiating the license. I requested and received trial access for testing purposes. I also knew that this product had been tested by the Library Accessibility Alliance. I confirmed that a barrier reported by the LAA was still in fact a problem and reported that along with some other issues to the vendor. They had it fixed in a week!

    In addition to repeatedly asking for VPATs and the fact that more and more institutions are requiring them, I think that spelling out exactly what the issue is and the impact it has on end users might be helping. For example, I told one vendor that their resource is essentially useless for users who navigate with the keyboard alone could not access the full text of articles on the search result page.

    There are still too many vendors who say "we're working on it" and I haven't found a good way to develop a timeline for expectations. I would love to learn how others do this.



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    Karen Grondin
    Licensing and Copyright Librarian
    Arizona State University Library
    She/Her/Hers
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  • 3.  RE: Experiences working with vendors

    Posted Feb 21, 2023 09:14 AM

    Karen- That's great news! We have to celebrate the small wins when we get them, I think. 

    To your question about timelines- when Trisha and I worked together, we created an escalation pathway for vendor communication. It's not exactly the same thing, but it's a useful exercise to sit down with other interested parties at your library or institution to agree on what is reasonable to expect from vendors and what you do next. A timeline could look similar, though of course you'd need to include the vendor as well at some point. 

    I'd also love to hear if others have had success with a similar approach.



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    Anaya Jones She/Her/Hers
    ___
    Accessibility & Online Learning Librarian
    Northeastern University
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  • 4.  RE: Experiences working with vendors

    Posted Feb 23, 2023 01:27 PM

    Thank you for sharing both of you!

    Now that I've moved into the IT space within Rice University as their Digital Information Accessibility Coordinator, I've been doing more reading into utilizing HECVAT or Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit as it includes accessibility components. I've noticed that the questions are the same or similar that I'd ask vendors as part of an accessibility review but they are included with other as important components as privacy and security. I was in a webinar a few weeks ago with the EDUCAUSE IT Accessibility group where other accessibility professionals talked about how they were using HECVAT. One of the presenters mentioned that they use it as a carrot with vendors...if they have a fully fleshed out  HECVAT they only have to do that once a year (or when their products/services are updated) and provide it to all the higher ed institutions, rather than being potentially inundated with similar accessibility questions institution by institution. 

    I'm game for any way that we can collaborate across organizations to get the information we all need to make sound accessibility decisions. Hopefully this is another way we can "hammer" on vendors if we are all asking for the same content/information and push for more accessible products/solutions.

    Best,

    Trisha



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    Trisha Prevett
    ELearning Librarian
    Southern New Hampshire University, Shapiro Library
    She/Her/Hers
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