Making repositories and data digitally accessible

November 18, 2024, 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT

An estimated 1 in 4 people live with a disability (sources: US disability statistics, UK disability statistics), including researchers and students. Digital accessibility standards provide guidelines for how to build and make digital content available to people with varying disabilities such as blindness, deafness, and cognitive disabilities. Recent guidance from the U.S. Department of Justice will require all government web content to be digitally accessible, a ruling that will impact public universities and their repositories. 

This webinar will examine how such accessibility mandates may affect repository managers, curators, and data creators. We will discuss considerations for making a repository’s web interface, metadata, and documentation files accessible. We will also review practices for making research data more accessible to disabled people. Working together, we can improve the accessibility of research data for everyone.

Speakers: Megan O’Donnell, Research Data Services Lead, Iowa State University, University Library and Kristin Briney, PhD MLIS, Biology & Biological Engineering Librarian, Caltech Library.

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