May 13, 2024 Open Teleconference: Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Working Group

Join NISO's Keondra Bailey on Monday, May 13th, 2024 at 12 PM Eastern for the May 2024 Open Teleconference. Keondra will be joined by Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Working Group co-chairs J. Stephen Downie and Bill Kasdorf, to discuss the Working Group's charge and goals for their output.

Many books, articles, videos, and other resources are often inaccessible or not sufficiently accessible to people with perceptual, cognitive, physical, or other disabilities. A significant percentage of the population has disabilities such as blindness, low vision, dyslexia, deafness, motor impairments, and other conditions that make it difficult or impossible for them to fully perceive and consume resources to the extent people without those disabilities can.

Most colleges and universities have what are usually called Disability Services Offices (DSOs) which use a combination of a small staff, student workers, and available software and other tools to remediate course materials and other resources each semester. There are also commercial services that do this work, typically outside of education.

Historically, the resulting remediated resource was rarely shared between DSOs: it was created for and only provided to a particular student. When another student at another university needed the same resource remediated in the same way, the DSO at that university would repeat the same remediation done at the first university—typically labor-intensive work. This results in a significant amount of duplication, cost, and delay. In order to facilitate the sharing of remediated resources, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded a project known as FRAME: Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Education. 

The FRAME metadata model was developed through a facilitated collaboration of the DSOs at the six original universities participating in the project (there are now seven), along with the academic libraries at those institutions. It also involved the participation of technical staff from the participating repositories as well as a key developer at the University of Virginia (UVA), where a fourth repository (known as EMMA–Educational Materials Made Accessible) has been created to provide access to resources that did not originate in one of the three original repositories.

The Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Working Group aims to extend and refine the FRAME/EMMA metadata model to meet the needs of the broader accessibility community, focused on individuals and organizations involved in the remediation of content for accessibility and the consumption of remediated content.