Warp Speed Ahead! Crash! How a Failed Project Identified a Much Larger Obstacle

Objective: To measure document accessibility of faculty publications, PDFs were uploaded into Blackboard Open LMS in order to gauge compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) as required by the recently revised Section 508 standards. Methods: Two librarians endeavored to establish a value-added service to format authors\u27 manuscripts to comply with current accessibility standards prior to submitting final documents to the publisher. Before launching the new service, the librarian\u27s began with a feasibility study. The librarians\u27 sought to understand what the most common PDF accessibility issues were, and aspired to correlate any accessibility issues with publisher, platform, or journal. To determine current levels of document accessibility, PDFs of articles published January - June of 2018 by authors from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) were examined using Ally, an accessibility tool in Blackboard Open LMS that automatically checks content for accessibility issues. Results: Unfortunately, the study revealed that establishing the new service to be unfeasible at this time. The librarians evaluated Ally accessibility scores of over a thousand article PDFs. Results reveal that the majority of the articles evaluated via Ally had an accessibility score of 6%, and two articles scored the highest at 97%. Analysis of feasibility study data is currently being completed with full results being presented at annual meeting. Conclusions: Based on our sample, article PDFs are not accessible and 96.4% of the articles evaluated scored below 50% accessibility in Ally. The most common accessibility issues identified by Ally were that the PDFs had no language set and were untagged. The next steps will be to reach out to publishers and journals to initiate a conversation about how MUSC authored publications can be made accessible to all