Audiovisual Accessibility Builds a Bridge to Diverse User Communities

A cross-institutional team from the Texas Digital Library consortium has developed a webinar series to address the need for awareness of accessibility for audio/video digital collections and to offer solutions for repository managers. The series presents the basics of improving the accessibility of digital audio and video (AV) collection materials hosted in the digital repositories of libraries and archives within the TDL membership. Supplemented by a birds-of-a-feather session at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL) 2022, the webinars provide a deeper understanding of the many benefits—aside from simply satisfying legal requirements—of providing alternative media such as captions/transcripts and other accessibility remediations. Additionally, they aim to demystify key concepts and share common approaches and practical first steps to adapting the accessibility of digital (digitized and born-digital) AV holdings, as well as discussing strategies for making the business case for accessibility. This poster is intended to report on our model for collaborative learning around accessibility issues for A/V collections and share outcomes of the series.