My User is a Machine: Making Information Accessible to Disabled Users by Structuring for Machine Intermediaries

Kenning Arlitsch*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Accessibility to information for disabled human users has increasingly become a legal and ethical concern for public education institutions. The Americans with Disabilities Act guarantees freedom from discrimination for disabled Americans, and recent lawsuits and formal complaints about inaccessible website content have propelled enforcement from an historically reactive stance to one that is proactive. Librarians pride themselves on providing information to all users, and the profession has long understood the need to structure data for other applications. However, many of us fail to use even the simple features built into software packages that can ensure accessible documents and presentations from the point of creation. This failure sets up a paradigm of perpetual effort required to remediate content for accessibility. Effective use of accessibility tools in document creation solves two accessibility problems for two audiences at once: humans and machines.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)728-738
Number of pages11
JournalJournal of Library Administration
Volume58
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - 3 Oct 2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • accessibility
  • assistive technologies
  • disabled users
  • document structure
  • document styles
  • presentation software
  • search engine optimization
  • structured data
  • word processing

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