Digital Accessibility: About

Because our library is committed to ensuring all of our students and employees can use our resource subscriptions, we will maintain a list of information regarding our vendors’ levels of commitment to accessibility.

Service is a core value of OSU-CHS, which necessitates the ongoing documentation of accessibility features to meet the needs of our users and to comply with technical standards. Likewise, this work aligns with principle one from the American Library Association’s Code of Ethics: “We provide the highest level of service to all library users through appropriate and usefully organized resources; equitable service policies; equitable access; and accurate, unbiased, and courteous responses to all requests.”  

A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template is used to create an Accessibility Conformance Report document. The VPAT helps us determine how well technological purchases meet the Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards.

The benefits and limitations of the VPAT are outlined by the National Center on Accessible Education Materials.

In 1996 the Department of Justice specified that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to online resources. The American Library Association defines web content as “the information and sensory experience to be communicated to the user… examples include text, images, sounds, videos, controls, animations, and conventional electronic documents.”