Digital Accessibility in Academic Libraries (DAAL)

Facilitated by Mark Weiler (mweiler@wlu.ca) and Aneta Kwak (aneta.kwak@utoronto.ca)

Digital Accessibility in Academic Libraries (DAAL) Community of Practice

Digital accessibility is broadly defined as 1) creating and procuring digital content to provide equitable access to the digital environment for disabled individuals and 2) designing digital responses to remove disadvantages in library environments that affect disabled individuals. Digital content includes anything that is digital, from websites, videos, audio, mobile applications, or virtual realities, just to name a few.
This community of practice seeks to foster an environment that equips academic librarians to improve the digital accessibility of academic libraries.

Objectives

  • To engage with library stakeholders, including disabled individuals or groups, vendors, consortia, and librarians, to learn about digital accessibility and inaccessibility
  • To learn about ableism and its effects on digital accessibility in academic librarianship
  • To study laws and accessibility guidelines relevant to academic libraries (e.g., WCAG 2.0, European Union Web Accessibility Directive , etc.), emerging guidelines (Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility), and informal ones, including their limitations
  • To learn about best practices meet guidelines to provide equitable access to digital content for disabled individuals

Membership structure

  • The community of practice is open to all CAPAL members
  • The community of practice shall aim to have two co-facilitators
  • Facilitators shall try to foster a core group of contributing members who organize the community of practice activities, such as monthly meetings topics and guest speakers, or community events
  • Facilitators shall maintain an “interest-group” list for CAPAL members who are interested but may not have time to help organize events
  • Facilitators shall maintain a “friends of CAPAL WCAG” list for non-CAPAL members who are interested in the community of practice

Recognition

  • Contributing members shall get a letter of appreciation from the CAPAL Digital Accessibility in Academic Libraries (DAAL) Community of Practice for their professional files and be acknowledge in the annual report to the CAPAL membership