Jun 19, 2018 Accessibility for Digital Audiovisual Resources

Jeremy Myntti (Head of Digital Library Services) and Molly Steed (Moving Image and Sound Archivist) have been awarded the Marriott Library Jumpstart Grant for 2018-2019. This internal grant program was designed to support new original research projects that address challenges in libraries and archives. The title of the project is “Accessibility for Digital Audiovisual Resources” and the term of the grant is July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019.

Through this project, we plan on researching and investigating methods for creating transcripts and captioning for digital audiovisual resources. Without a transcript or captioning available for this type of content, users with a disability such as hearing impairment are not able to fully use the resources, and the potential for scholarly digital analysis of the materials is limited. By looking at different tools that can be used for creating this type of data in-house as well as examining options for outsourcing some or all of the transcription of audiovisual items, this project will help to ensure that this content becomes more accessible to all of our users regardless of their needs.

Accessibility needs to be at the forefront of all library projects to make sure that we are meeting the needs of our patrons. It can be difficult to know all of the needs to our digital library users since we do not have face-to-face interactions with the majority of them. If a digital library patron is not able to get the information they need from our resources because we have not done the necessary work to make them accessible, we are not serving our patrons to the best of our abilities. This project will give the Marriott Library and its industry partners the practical information we need to effectively implement a program to make digital audio and audiovisual collections fully accessible to all users, including the hearing impaired.

Expect to see project updates throughout the year on this blog as we explore several of the options available for making our digital audiovisual resources more accessible for all users.