Libraries

Members of the Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) are pleased to announce their  new website, featuring enhancements to the popular accessibility evaluations of databases, along with an expanded collection of resources.

The new website provides a critical platform for the collective’s 2021 priorities: sharing the results from accessibility testing of library e-resources, offering assessments of previous LAA work, providing robust collections of training and related resources, as well as a new White Paper that is an examination of the efforts of e-resource accessibility testing through 2020.

“The Big Ten Academic Alliance is proud to be partnering with our consortial colleagues in launching the new Library Accessibility Alliance Website,” stated Rob Van Rennes, Associate Director, Library Initiatives at the Big Ten Academic Alliance. “Collaboration lies at the heart of our work and the new LAA website embodies the principles that we value.”

Amy Drayer, User Interface Developer at the University of Minnesota Libraries, described the revised access to e-resource accessibility reports: "The testing group was doing amazing work creating accessibility awareness and providing opportunities to vendors to improve their product. What we needed was to make the reports themselves more intuitive to help inform the library community of these efforts. By extracting data, we could make the work more meaningful from more perspectives.”

Stephanie Rosen, Library Accessibility Strategist at the University of Michigan, said: “The Library Accessibility Alliance is a powerful combination of existing organizations, now representing about 100 member libraries. The new website is a more accessible platform that makes our evaluations of vendor e-resources more understandable and usable for our community. It will also be the launch pad for the LAA’s growing work in training, advocacy, and other areas related to library accessibility.”

The Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA) promotes equitable service and access to libraries and library resources. The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) formed the Library E-Resource Accessibility Group in 2015 to address concerns about the accessibility of library e-resources. In 2019, the  Association of Southern Research Libraries (ASERL) partnered with the BTAA creating the Library Accessibility Alliance. In 2021, the  Greater Western Library Alliance and the Washington Research Library Consortium also joined the effort. As the composition of the group has grown, the scope of work has also expanded to multiple areas in support of library accessibility.