Working with Resource Vendors on Web Accessibility

UC Berkeley Web Accessibility Evangelist and chair of UC’s Electronic Accessibility Leadership Team (EALT), Lucy Greco serves on a working group to improve the accessibility of Elsevier’s products.   Elsevier ScienceDirect is consistently one of UC’s most heavily used (and costliest) resources.  Lucy has been participating on a team of 7-8 librarians and accessibility staff from other institutions reviewing the ScienceDirect interface.  Lucy uses a screen reader to navigate licensed vendor sites.  She has reported that access is much, much improved through the work of the team.  Search results, for example, have gone from being represented in multiple tables—very difficult to navigate with a screen reader—to just one table.  See the article on this ongoing work, Why web accessibility is the new usability.

Food for thought: How accessible are our other vendor resources?  How can we assist in making all our vendors equally responsive to accessibility issues?

Thanks to Lucy for helping make licensed resources truly available to all UC students, faculty and staff, as well as those at other institutions.