Abstract
Our University’s institutional repository (IR) faces a common problem, how to achieve 508 compliance and ensure accessibility for all users. We lack adequate staffing and funding to verify and improve the accessibility of current theses and dissertations (ETDs), as well as those retrospectively digitized. In Spring 2020, we launched a new initiative to hire and train a student employee focused on the remediation of approximately 600 previously digitized theses. When our campus closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic that March, we made the decision to expand this opportunity to all library student employees, providing them with a project they could work on remotely. As a regional campus serving many non-traditional, first-generation, and parenting students, it was important that our student employees could continue working and maintain their income. By converting this to a telecommuting project, we were able to keep all student assistants who were interested in teleworking employed from nearly every department in the library. Additionally, we were able to expand the scope of our remediation efforts, with the original project growing from all retrospectively digitized theses (approximately 1,000 in all) to all ETD content in the institutional repository (an additional 4,500).
In this presentation, we will discuss training student workers in 508 compliance and remediation tasks and best practices for managing students in a remote work environment. We will also speak more broadly about creating and maintaining accessible collections, and how the data we’ve gathered over the past 16+ months will inform our accessibility practices in the future, especially as we return to campus and our pre-pandemic staffing levels.