Do You Hear What I See? Assessing Accessibility of Digital Commons and CONTENTdm

Abstract

This article discusses the accessibility of two content management systems, Berkeley Electronic Press's Digital Commons and OCLC's CONTENTdm, widely used in libraries to host institutional repository and digital collections content. Based on observations by a visually impaired student who used the JAWS screen reader to view the design and display of digital objects in both systems, we provide a general overview of the accessibility of each system. We discuss potential suggestions for accessibility-related improvements, and we offer ideas for library administrators of these systems about how to maximize the back-end configurations for accessibility.

KEYWORDS:

• accessibility
• screen reader users
• digital collections
• Digital Commons
• CONTENTdm
• WCAG 2.0