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Don't Work in Isolation: Library Partners and Organizational Support for Accessibility

Angelina Zaytsev

HighEdWeb 2020 Accessibility Summit

June 25, 2020

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What is HathiTrust?

A digital library
A membership organization

www.hathitrust.org

June 25, 2020

Before I get into all that, what is HathiTrust?

One thing many people are unsure of is how to pronounce our name. Although the first part is spelled HATHI from the Hindi word for elephant, it’s pronounced with a hard T. The image on this screen, of our elephant logo drinking a cup of tea, is a close approximation. When you’re talking about HathiTrust, imagine you’re asking for a cup of “hot tea”.

We were founded in 2008 in order to solve a common problem that many university libraries were encountering. in the late 2000s, many libraries were starting projects to digitize significant portions of their collections, often through partnerships with Google and Internet Archive. However, building and maintaining digital repositories to house these scanned materials was an incredibly expensive endeavor, so the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (now the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and the University of California banded together to build a shared digital repository.

We now have 17.4 million digitized books in our collection, making us the largest not-for-profit digital library in the world. Unlike many electronic resources and databases, our collection is open to the public where copyright has expired or we have received permission from copyright holders to open access. In addition, we offer services that are only available to our member libraries.

Secondly, we are a membership organization. We have over 160 members serving over 200 campuses. Your university might be one of our members as well. You can check this by going to our website, clicking the login button, and searching for your university name in the dropdown menu under “partner institutions.”

Because we are a member organization, our work priorities are determined by our members, through a Board of Governors, the Program Steering Committee, various working groups, our annual member meeting, and numerous opportunities to provide feedback.

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Our challenges

Many stakeholders
Small staff
Shared developers

June 25, 2020

This leads to one of our challenges, that we struggle to balance the voices of many stakeholders. All of these groups and mechanisms feed into our planning structures, which makes our planning process complicated but very rich. We also have to balance the voices of our stakeholders with the members of the public that use our digital library.

Another challenge we face is that we have a small number of full-time staff members. Since we launched in 2008, we’ve grown from a team of 2 to 12 staff members.

We also share developers with our host organization, the University of Michigan. This requires a lot of coordination. Although we’ve tried to adopt agile practices, this doesn’t really work in our environment because our developers can be working on several different teams and projects at the same time. There’s a lot of overhead and planning in a distributed organization, which is very anti-agile.

�What this means, however, is that collaboration and coordination are built into our very core, and we are uniquely positioned to observe what our member libraries are struggling with.

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Challenges our member libraries face

Library missions: to collect, facilitate access to, and teach the use of resources

Diversity and accessibility part of the cultural discourse

Verifying the accessibility of resources they license

Payan v. Los Angeles Community College District lawsuit

Partnering with disability service offices to provide accessible versions of resources

June 25, 2020

The primary mission for libraries is to collect resources, facilitate access to these collections, and teach our users how to use and understand the materials that we’ve collected. Whether these resources are subscription databases, video game archives, or 3D printers and maker labs, access is one of the key mandates of libraries.

It’s unsurprising then that diversity and accessibility are a significant part of our cultural discourse. We talk about structural inequities that prevent our patrons from accessing our resources, such as how society prevents individuals with disabilities from fully accessing resources. This is a large part of library conversations. For example, at the University of Michigan, where I’m based, our diversity initiative is called DEI&A - Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility. This is a core part of the conversation.

There are two challenges our members face in the area of accessibility that we at HathiTrust are working to solve.

Some librarians have been monitoring the accessibility of the eresources they license. For example, the Big Ten Academic Alliance Library E-Resource Accessibility Group has been performing their own independent accessibility evaluations of vendor databases. They’ve also been providing other librarians with resources and standardized licensing agreement language to incorporate accessibility into contracts with vendors.

Making this work even more urgent, last year, the National Federation of the Blind won a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Community College District. An outcome of that lawsuit is that universities and libraries are responsible for the accessibility of the software and resources that they license. Even if a university did not develop the software or resource, since they paid for it, they are responsible for ensuring students have equal access to the resources.

Many libraries also partner with disability service offices to provide accessible versions of books.

I’ll be talking about the work we at HathiTrust have done recently to address both of these challenges.

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Member challenge: verify accessibility of licensed resources

Serendipity and an opportunity
Project: review and document the accessibility of our digital library platform with a Voluntary Product accessibility Template (VPAT)

June 25, 2020

In the winter of 2018, one of my colleagues at the University of Michigan Library, Stephanie Rosen, the Accessibility Specialist, connected me with a student who was looking for work. Luke had prior experience creating Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates, and Stephanie knew that this was on our wish list of projects we wanted to accomplish at HathiTrust. Stephanie and I had worked together in the past on accessibility projects or to share information, so we had an established relationship.

Her email introducing me to Luke was a moment of serendipity that ended up having a profound impact on our 2019 projects.

Over time, and with increasing frequency in the past couple of years, we had received requests to provide a VPAT. A colleague at University of Michigan Publishing shared their estimate that it would take approximately 40 hours of work to conduct an accessibility evaluation, which was quite a formidable number of staff hours to divert from other projects. We were starting to talk about outsourcing the work, when I got an email from Stephanie. It was the perfect opportunity.

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Seizing the opportunity

Our mission

“To dramatically improve access to these materials in ways that, first and foremost, meet the needs of the co-owning institutions, with a particular emphasis on ensuring access for individuals with print disabilities.”

Our strategic directions

“Extend the access program for print-disabled users in the general public to dramatically increase the volume of accessible materials.”
“Streamline existing services for print-disabled users and amplify our focus on accessibility for all users of HathiTrust’s services.”

June 25, 2020

However, I still had to advocate to make the project happen now, as opposed to at some unknown later time.

Luckily, I could fall back on two high-level organizational guiding documents which specifically call out accessibility.

Our mission states that one goal of HathiTrust is “to dramatically improve access to these materials in ways that, first and foremost, meet the needs of the co-owning institutions, with a particular emphasis on ensuring access for individuals with print disabilities.”

In addition, the Strategic Directions that were approved by the membership in 2019 call out accessibility in two possible activities that HathiTrust should undertake in the next few years:

“Extend the access program for print-disabled users in the general public to dramatically increase the volume of accessible materials.”

“Streamline existing services for print-disabled users and amplify our focus on accessibility for all users of HathiTrust’s services.”

Thus, when I was making an argument about why we should fit the VPAT project into our 2019 annual plan, I could easily point back to our mission and our strategic directions for justification.

I would encourage you to examine the mission statements and strategic plans for your own organizations to see if they call out accessibility or serving diverse users with diverse needs. Although these high-level documents can be toothless at times, my own personal philosophy when doing diversity work is that you’ve got to seize whatever space is offered and make it meaningful. So if your administration says that they care about diversity and accessibility, take them at their word, and make that project happen.

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VPAT project

Expectations

2-3 months for review of website
2 weeks to fix any issues
2 weeks to finalize the VPAT

Reality

June 25, 2020

When I planned our VPAT project, I was pretty optimistic about how it would go.

I estimated that the review work would take 2, maybe 3, months, then a couple of weeks to fix any issues, after which the VPAT should be ready to go in another 2 weeks.

Our last major website update in 2013 had, after all, included an accessibility audit of our digital library, and we conformed to WCAG 2.0 level AA at that time. Since then we’d only done minor bug fixes and improvements. Surely our accessibility audit would surface only minor issues that could be quickly solved. Right?

Oof. Was I wrong. As the pie chart on this slide shows, we uncovered 78 issues! Of those, 52 were pretty minor. 15 were somewhat significant, causing frustration but not preventing the user from accomplishing their task. 8 were very significant, meaning the user could find a work around but it might slow them down. And 3 were critical failures.

We learned a major lesson from doing this project. Although we hadn’t changed our website much, the Internet around us had changed. Users had higher expectations for accessibility, more manual and automated checking tools had become available, and more guidelines had been developed. Staying stagnant cost us in the end.

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VPAT project

Expectations

2-3 months for review of website
2 weeks to fix any issues
2 weeks to finalize the VPAT

Reality

78 issues uncovered
2 months to update the website and fix most issues
Ongoing work to resolve more difficult issues

June 25, 2020

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VPAT project outcomes

Major website update in June 2019
Responsive website in October 2019
The first of many accessibility projects in 2019

2019 the “year of accessibility”

June 25, 2020

However, despite the pain of that very difficult lesson, this project ended up being an incredible starting point for other work. In June 2019, we released a major website update to solve the accessibility issues, and we also were able to incorporate fixes to frustrations that had been brought up in recent usability testing.

This major website update also paved the way for another project we had been dreading because of how much work it would likely take, and in October 2019, we were able to launch a responsive version of our digital library website and get rid of our ancient separate mobile website that had been built back in 2009. There’s nothing quite like getting rid of a broken website that gives you nothing but headaches.

The VPAT project also kicked off other accessibility projects and paved the way to other work that we’ve been able to continue this year.

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Member challenge: providing accessible books

Project: Improve documentation and branding for our service
New name: Accessible Text Request Service (ATRS)
New, comprehensive documentation about accessibility, ATRS
Add Accessibility page to footer

June 25, 2020

A second member challenge we’ve been engaging with is the provision of accessible books.

Since 2013, we’ve offered members a service where a staff member on their campus can retrieve downloads of copyrighted books from the HathiTrust collection and then remediate them to meet their users’s needs. However, this service hasn’t been well known or well used.

As we were wrapping up the VPAT project, we also updated our public documentation of this service and rebranded it with a more recognizable name. Once again, my student employee, Luke - god bless student employees - helped out with this project by visiting websites for disability service offices to research what language they typically use for services like this. As a result, we gave our service the new name of Accessible Text Request Service, which was immediately used by our member contacts. 4 new pages document the accessibility of our website and how to set up the Accessible Text Request Service. We also finally included Accessibility in our website footer so that a link to accessibility information is included wherever you go on our site.

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Federating Repositories of Accessible Learning Materials for Higher Education

Collaboration with Internet Archive, Benetech, UVirginia to build:

a search interface to allow disability service offices to discover accessible and remediated files
a repository to allow upload of remediated files so other campuses can provide them �to their users

June 25, 2020

Another collaborative way that we’re working to meet the need of providing accessible books is through a Mellon-funded grant project. In the Federating Repositories of Accessible Learning Materials for Higher Education grant project - which is frequently abbreviated to FRAME- we are working with University of Virginia, Internet Archive, Benetech and several campuses to build a shared repository that will allow disability services offices to upload their remediated files in order to store and share them with other campuses. This will also be a search interface across the 3 repository collections, so disability office staff can go to one location to search across the 3 collections.

We are hoping to have a working prototype for the participating universities by this fall. The goal is to eventually expand this product to include other universities as well as other repository collections.

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"The Law and Accessible Texts:

Reconciling Civil Rights and Copyrights"

Legal white paper out of FRAME grant
Reviews and dismantles common perceptions about copyright restrictions held by many disability services staff

Download it from arl.org

June 25, 2020

An early outcome of the FRAME grant is the legal white paper "The Law and Accessible Texts: Reconciling Civil Rights and Copyrights", which was written by several lawyers. This paper reviewed the common perceptions about copyright that many disability services staff have about how copyright law restricts what they can do. In reviewing the fair use clauses of US Copyright Law, the Chafee Amendment, and the precedent set by the Authors Guild vs HathiTrust lawsuit, the authors determined that disability service offices have a lot of leeway to do their work of transforming copyrighted works into accessible formats.

The paper reviewed every step of a common remediation workflow, from requesting files to conversion to sharing the files with other disability offices, and reviewed how copyright law protects all of these activities.

For example, one common perception that many disability services staff have is that the student or the office needs to purchase a copy of a book before an accessible copy can be made. However, the authors conclude that, “Neither the requestor nor the fulfilling institution needs to purchase an inaccessible copy in connection with each (or any) request for an accessible one.” Relaxing this requirement can ease the burdens on both the student making the request as well as disability services staff.

The authors also reviewed the common practice that publishers have of adding restrictive agreements and clauses when sharing files with disability services staff. They determined that these agreements are more restrictive than copyright law indicates they need to be.

I would encourage you to read or share this white paper with your own disability service offices. You can download it on the Association of Research Libraries website.

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Summary:

Build connections with others on your campus who are doing accessibility work.
Partner with other organizations and units to find shared solutions to common problems.
Re-investigate the assumptions that constrain your work.

June 25, 2020

So to summarize the main points that I want you to leave with today:

Build connections with others on your campus who are doing accessibility work. Sometimes this can result in important moments of serendipity that you would never have foreseen, such as being connected with a student who has the exact skill set that you need in order to accomplish a critical but difficult project.
Partner with other organizations and units to find shared solutions to common problems. For us, this resulted in the creation of HathiTrust 12 years ago, and we carry onthe spirit in which we were founded by engaging in important collaborations, like the FRAME grant.

And last of all,

Re-investigate the assumptions that constrain your work. Copyright law can be a gnarly, headache of a mess, but it can also be a powerful tool that protects your work and allows you to do more.

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