Hannah Murphy

Welcome, to ADA Title two compliance at EBSCO for progress and updates. I'm Hannah Murphy, senior product marketing manager of SaaS and open-source initiatives at EBSCO. I'm just going to go over a few housekeeping items before our presenters start today. This session is being recorded. We have a due to the size of the audience, all attendees have been muted to avoid any sound feedback or interruptions.

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And with that, I will turn it over to Amber Russell for to kick us off.

Amber Russell

Thank you, Hannah.

Morning, everybody, wherever you are. I am excited to talk to you all about, EBSCO and our ADA title two compliance, what we've been doing for accessibility here, share our process, talk about some updates, and also share where you can find documentation.

I want to start off by reminding everybody that I am not a lawyer. So please, check with legal counsel if you do have legal questions. This is me, Amber Russell, if you are able to see the screen.

I'm EBSCO's accessibility and globalization product manager. So I oversee both, of those domains for our products, and that would include really our entire portfolio at EIS.

I've got eighteen years of experience, and a background in software consulting, UX design. I did, some training and, accessibility program management prior to joining EBSCO in 2022. So I'm coming up on four years now. I have my CPAC, by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. That's a certification. I've had that since 2018, and I started, working in the accessibility space in about twenty sixteen.

I'm based in Northern California. It's fun to see some people from Chico and, Woodland. I'm in Grass Valley for the people that are in Northern California. Tiny little town, south of Tahoe, north of Sacramento.

Later on, we'll be joined by Cody Care, who you can see on camera now, and he's an accessibility engineer on my team. So he'll talk a little bit more about, some of our employee work and the outreach that we do, with training and tutorials and things like that.

So I want to start first, by giving a just a brief definition of what digital accessibility is. So when we're talking about, accessibility, there is accessibility of the built environment, which would be curb cuts, you know, if you're walking or a button that opens the doors. So that's kind of our built environment, but we're talking about digital accessibility. And the definition of that is the ability of an application to be easily navigated and understood by a wide range of users, including those users who have visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities. And that's really important because it means equity, and that that's what we want in in our world and in our digital applications. You might also see this as an eleven y or Ally, which is because there's eleven letters between the a and the y in accessibility.

So there's been, in the last couple few years, a lot of regulations happening around accessibility, which has been great. And in Europe, the European Accessibility Act happened and went into effect in June of 2025. I don't think I didn't see anybody coming in from Europe.

But why does that matter? It matters because the requirements to meet the European Accessibility Act are very, very similar to the requirements for ADA title two. It required conformance with WCAG two one double a as well as the European standard, which is EN three zero one five four nine. So EBSCO has already been working towards meeting that as an international company.

So we've already done a lot of the work to meet title two. As you all know, which is why you're here, the updates to ADA title two are going into effect this April. And that title two has been in existence, I think, since nineteen seventy-three. But these updates expand from just the built environment to digital applications.

Landmark ruling. Really big deal.

And the UK, Ireland, we're seeing some organizations in Australia and also Canada are requiring conformance with the most recent version of WCAG, which is two point two double EBSCO builds designs and is targeting conformance with WCAG two point two.

So let's talk about a little bit about what ADA title two is.

It is mandating that state and local governments, so public colleges or universities, schools, libraries, have equal access, to services, programs, activities for individuals with disabilities.

Meaning that websites, mobile apps, all your digital documents, all your online platforms, need to meet WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, two-point one level double a.

So as I mentioned, EBSCO is targeting two point two. There's six success criteria between two point one and two point two, but it is backwards compatible. So if you meet two point two, you definitely meet two point one.

And that goes into effect April of 2026 unless you're a smaller entity in which you have another year.

So I like to talk about EBSCO's mission statement.

The mission statement is not an accessibility focused mission statement. However, it is about equity. Their mission statement is to transform lives by providing relevant and reliable information when, where, and how people need it. And when I was joining EBSCO in 2022, this really struck me because it does talk about equity, and it does talk about accessibility because it is, so inclusive. And so that is EBSCO's mission, and I think we do a really good job of living that.

I wanted to share a little bit about EBSCO's accessibility journey. They've been doing accessibility for a really long time. I talked to some employees, some very long-term employees, and they remember things happening actually a little bit earlier than two thousand seven.

But that was when the actual core accessibility team was, was established was two thousand seven. It was made official, in twenty fourteen.

2022 is when I joined. There was a lot of things happening between then, and accessibility sneezed throughout the organization, which is why I was really thrilled, to have the opportunity to work with EBSCO. We really started, focusing hard on, the European Accessibility Act and making sure that our platforms were, were meeting with CAC, as well as creating content remediation, workflow, and ensuring that our customers had the documentation that they need.

And then the DOJ announced the updates to ADA title two, which is, again, a huge deal in this landscape.

So and then now we're actually in 2026 now, but it continues. The title two conformance is ongoing, and accessibility is never done. This timeline will continue, but it it's going to be very similar, because we always want to not only be meeting WCAG, whichever version comes out, but we want to make sure that beyond compliance, we're creating solutions that that work for our customers and all of our users.

So some updates. The biggest update is that we've got an update to our navigation, and these are designs that are not final designs, but kind of the idea of them.

And these will go into effect. The work is happening right now and should be released sometime this summer.

I will talk a little bit more about this and how it affects our documentation, but we do audits and, a third-party audit after large releases. So we're initially planning to do, and a third party audit this January.

However, due to these large design changes, which I think will be very, very positive both from an accessibility and a user standpoint, we're going to push our third-party audit until after this is released to ensure that we're encompassing all of these changes and making sure we haven't introduced any anything else.

Another thing that I wanted to share is we do have a platform road map. I don't know if everybody is aware of that.

I've got the link on the bottom there. And if you it's available from EBSCO Connect. And if you select accessibility, you can see what might be open and what we're working on there. So we'll be adding more there.

Anything that is on our ACR will have, have issues linked here. So you have some transparency into what may be open and the time on when it will be resolved. And then we've also got some other exciting things here. You can see HLM, has been doing a ton of work, to ensure that that all of their new UI is going to be aligned with WCAG two point two.

So it's a great place to check for, any, new work that might be coming out or anything that, you know, perhaps you've seen there's a partially supports or a does not support on the ACR, if you don't see a date in the ACR, which we try to always provide unless it's still under, investigation, that you could check the roadmap and it would be there.

So let's talk about accessibility conformance. So most of the questions that, our accessibility team has been getting over really the past year is, I need an ACR and an accessibility conformance report or a VPAT, you might call it. And I need it to show that everything is supported. And if it's not supported, when will it be supported?

And, and we have that, and, you know, I'll talk about our documentation. But one thing I want to talk about is how, accessibility documentation in a SDLC that is, continuous releases doesn't really line up. So it's important to note that your ACR that you're reading, that documentation that you're reading is just a snapshot in time. It is a picture of when, that testing was carried out.

And so if you've got an ACR from January of 2025, it's going to be really different than an ACR from January of 2026, at least in, in our ecosystem. We are constantly releasing things.

I think most of you, if not all of you, are customers, so you're seeing that we've got different features coming out all of the time. And so, for our new UI product, we're constantly doing internal testing and updating the ACR, usually quarterly, maybe more often if we have a large release. But it's really an iterative process. And so your documentation is never going to be as up to date as, as you want it to be.

And, you know, we do everything that we can, for every feature to you know, there's testing, built in. Before we release, we test everything, to ensure that it not only meets WCAG, but it is also an accessible user experience. So you can meet, WCAG two point one or two and still have a really inaccessible experience. And so we want to go beyond compliance, and also ensure that, that we're releasing things that are accessible to all of our users.

So we do our best to always report on any issues that that we do find. And as, you know, you might be aware, it's not only in accessibility. Sometimes things squeak through.

Sometimes technology doesn't interact well. And so that's why we are constantly testing and constantly doing internal audits. All of our teams are trained on that as well.

So how do we do that?

Accessibility testing and reviews are part of every one of our features, and every release. And so we don't just test in a silo, but we test the entire solution. So if we've added something, say, to a page, we don't just test that maybe that link or that functionality. We test the entire page.

We do automated and manual testing of our reusable components. So, reusable components could be buttons, or a save option or a drop down. Our developers have manual checklists, and, my team is a part of that process as well. As I mentioned, we schedule third party audits after a large release or every three years. And coming up with the new navigation, design changes, that's going to be both. It's going to be every three year that are our third year and, and a large release. So we've got all of our ACRs and our accessibility statements on EBSCO Connect.

And, you know, the other the other thing is that there's third party tools in in pretty much any application that you're using. You know, there's Salesforce maybe embedded in there.

There's different calendar widgets that organizations may use. And so that's other things that we have to test and make sure, if a third party hasn't updated their component when maybe Chrome comes out with a new version, then we need to make sure that there's compatibility and that we haven't introduced errors. So, that's all everything that we're always looking at with that ongoing testing.

So, we've also been getting a lot of, some reports from customers of, hey. I ran a scan on your site. When are you going to fix these things? And we so appreciate, any issues that are shared with us. But I did want to share an article that is on Connect. I put the link in here as well that really breaks down our entire testing process. So we do a combination of automated testing, keyboard testing, screen reader testing, and testing with users with disabilities as well, in addition to third party testing.

So that having that standard, allows us to have consistency and actionable guidance. So if we if we find an issue, we make sure that we report it and we address it. And some things, happen so quickly that they don't even make it into the ACR.

And if we do have, customer reported issues, those are triaged in the same way that that any bug that you might find, in the software any software is triaged.

So I think one of the reasons you're all here is you want to know where you can get the documentation that you need. So first thing I want to mention is that our ACRs are by platform, not database. And so that would mean if you are looking for a number of databases that you subscribe to, but you're accessing those on the new UI platform, so EBSCO Discovery Service or EHOST, then you would want that ACR for EDS or EHOST or BSI or there's Novelist core collections. Those are all going to be on that same platform, so that is going to be the ACR that you want.

Those are all posted on EBSCO Connect. And as I mentioned, they're updated usually quarterly, but definitely yearly if there's not as many releases or not updates happening. We have some products that are not on a continuous release cycle like new UI, and so those are more yearly. Accessibility statements, we update every year.

Those reflect information in our ACRs. Those are also posted on EBSCO Connect. And then a new thing that was just added are accessibility road maps.

And these are documents that align with our ACRs and anything that is a partially supports or does not support. We've got information there on the timeline.

That information is also in the ACR, but I know that, the road map is often needed for compliance purposes. So I've also got a note on here, that we are going to have our third-party audit in July of 2026-ish, due to the navigation updates.

So this is our accessibility documentation page. I actually just updated this, Friday and this morning. Our Connect guy was able to get it in for me right before this, which is great. So prior to this morning, we had an ACR VPAT page.

We had an accessibility statement page. And then for road map, you would need to send an email to us, which, I know not everybody wants to do. You're always welcome to. But we've got road maps in here as well.

So now you can you know, perhaps you need something for the e-book viewer. You can come in here. You can grab the ACR. You can grab the statement, and you can, download the road map as well.

So it's all on one page, and this is linked, directly from the EBSCO accessibility quick start guide.

Alright. So let's talk a little bit about, some accessibility features.

We've got skip links, within new UI. It is fully responsive, so, you can access it on your phone or a tablet.

We have landmarks in addition to skip links. We've got headings, and then we've also got the text to speech tool, which is ReadSpeaker, and that's for HTML, PDF, and e-books. That's available within the viewer. If you are looking at the screen, it is, it's shown in the bottom screenshot there. The e-books one looks a little bit different. We've added, some new features there.

And I believe we've got text highlighting, the ability to download, automatic scrolling, and then you can change playback speed. The UI is keyboard accessible. We do a ton of testing on that.

And, I don't have it on here, but it is also screen reader accessible. That's really important to us as well, not just for compliance reasons, but because we do have screen reader users, and I know that, you do too. And then we've got the link to the accessible content request form for PDFs, for full text, and for e-books.

So right now, our current ACR that's out there for conformance with WCAG 2.1 AA, we have one, known issue, which is the Toast messages.

And this is for two one timing adjustable. Right now, our Toast messages are only showing for six seconds, which technically is not meeting.

However, screen reader users are notified of the messages, so the message is announced. But if you are cited, you may not see that Toast message, and it auto dismisses. And so it's a minor one, but it does not totally meet. That's the only thing due to timing adjustable, but that is planned to be resolved by. Let's talk about content accessibility. So EBSCO has a lot of content. It was actually more than I realized.

There's 29,000 plus publishers that EBSCO works with as an aggregator. There's 75,000 magazines, scholarly, and trade publications, and there's two hundred and eighty thousand plus, I don't know how big that plus is, other publication types. And then we have one point five plus billion articles that are indexed. That is a ton of content. I checked in with our remediation team, and from July first to, the end of December, they had remediated ten thousand pages, which is a large chunk.

There's a lot of remediation happening, a lot of requests that are coming through. So I was quite impressed with what we've done. The reason that we do need to remediate and it's just not possible for us, especially as an aggregator, to make all of this one point five plus billion articles that could be any number of pages. It's just not possible or feasible for us to remediate everything. So the other thing that we're doing is, you know, we're doing lots of publisher outreach, and we're also adding as much full text as we can. And those numbers are going up daily.

So our challenges, publisher limitations, inconsistent standards between publishers. There's also a lot of small publishers that simply don't have the resources to update their content.

And so we offer remediation for our customers to kind of bridge that gap there. There's also some domain specific remediation needs. So we've got stem alt text here. So thinking if you've got maybe, an article on physics, it'd be really challenging to write alt text unless you were the author writing the alt text.

And, you know, I've also heard, well, why don't you just use AI? Can't you just, you know, have AI do all of this for you?

We can't.

It's, one, not always accurate. And two, we are not able to do that due to licensing restrictions, and it we're just not able to do it. Not at this time. I hope in the future there will be better AI solutions.

So we are offering content remediation workflows so that is built directly into our viewer. I've got a slide on that in a moment.

We're doing the publisher outreach. I've met with many publishers to share information about WCAG and what this requirement means and share resources. And so we're doing what we can there.

And then we've also added metadata for discoverability. So we're adding more metadata and trying to make it easier to understand out of our billions of articles, what content, you know, is accessible.

So here is our content remediation, form. And if oops. I realized I've covered up some of my content. But if you are in one of the viewers, the button is called accessibility support. It's on the far right. If you act activate that, then a form will come up, and it's called accessible content support.

And it will autofill your information if you are logged in, and you can request a different you know, what format you want. Right now, actually, I'm realizing this is an old screenshot. We're only offering Word and HTML, not PDF at this time.

And you should get it I've got it on here as thirty-three to thirty business days. I mentioned we had ten thousand pages. Our remediation team was a little bit backed up as of, last week. They are all caught up, and so we should be back on the three to five business days.

That's it for me. Cody, I'm going to pass it to you. Cody is an accessibility engineer on my team, and he's going to talk about a lot of the outreach work that we do and the training for our employees.

Cody Care

Can you hear me?

Amber Russell

We can.

Cody Care

Alright. Hello, everyone. I am Cody Care. I am from Northern Massachusetts in a lovely little city called Haverhill.

Fun fact, it is nicknamed Shoe City, and there are a number of Shoe statues. And I've heard you win a prize if you find them all. I have yet to. I am a native screen reader user, fully blind for over a decade now, using a screen reader for fourteen years.

I have a, oh, educational background in computer science and interest in web development. Am I missing any of my fun facts?

I don't know. I oh, I am a musician. I have a new single coming out over the next couple months called glowing in the dark. It's a lovely little love song. I think that's it to intro me. Amber, if you could bring me on to the next slide, please.

Amber Russell

Absolutely.

Cody Care

Thank you.

So this slide is going to be talking about our accessibility navigation guide. Put in a lot of work last year in order to put this together, and this is a screen reader guide for a number of different functionalities on the platform from doing a basic search to doing an advanced search, basic tips and tricks for navigation, and tips for using a number of the different modals around the website, including how to download, how to site, how to add projects, and things of that nature.

That was only phase one. There is going to be a phase two once the navigation work is completed, and I'm going to go into all of the dashboard pages like projects and holds and checkouts, saved alerts, and so on.

There will also be videos accompanying all of the guides that we have up so far. So once phase two starts, the videos will be coming out as well for phase one included.

And I think that's it for this slide. Amber, if you could jump me to the next one.

Amber Russell

You're there.

Cody Care

Thank you.

Amber Russell

That's all your training and collaboration.

Cody Care

Awesome. So a lot to talk about here. So advocacy, as I'm sure a lot of you who might be more familiar with accessibility know, advocacy is the name of the game. It is just spreading the word, getting more people on board, and a lot is happening at EBSCO to do that.

Every Monday, we have an accessibility office hours for everyone that's internal in the company. Whoever shows up can or whoever would like to show up shows up, and we answer questions. We go over a number of different topics, but something very fun for me to do is we have been doing a biweekly tutorial of something in accessibility. It started off primarily being about screen readers and NVDA. And over the past few months, we have been diving into the web content accessibility guidelines.

That has been a lot of fun, a lot of good information. I have learned a lot.

And, I forgot to say this. I'm a CPAC holder. So even as a CPAC holder, you can never learn quite enough, I find.

Aside from these tutorials, we do a lot of reaching out to dev teams, and it's been cool to see that grow over the past year.

I am now working I get a lot of individual messages on Teams and emails asking about different accessibility work people are working on.

And it's always cool to see the little things Teams are working on, and it's always really exciting to see people really starting to care about it in the way that I think they should.

And something that's come out of that is we have had a number of new subject matter experts start popping up in the company and people that are fluent more fluent than I am in voice over on Mac, which is super helpful. This way, we can test a wider spread of things.

Amber, am I forgetting anything here?

Amber Russell

No. I don't think so.

Cody Care

Alright. Well, that will wrap it up for me. Thank you everyone for attending. This is a very cool experience to be here. Thank you.

Amber Russell

Thanks, Cody.

Cody Care

Yeah. No problem.

Amber Russell

Alright. So, I wanted to share how to stay informed, and we've got the accessibility quick start guide. I mentioned that I just updated our accessibility documentation, page. So the previously, it was ACR VPATs and then separately accessibility statements. So that's now accessibility documentation. And you can link to this quick start guide through the QR code that's on the screen.

And it's also on the previous slide. And from there, can see the ACRs, the roadmaps, as well as CODI's, new UI accessibility navigation guide. There's also an e-book accessibility user guide and FAQs, that's very robust. I know, Emma Waecker, director for e-books, updated that earlier this year. It's quite great. There's information on the content remediation form and, also information on accessibility regulations. So if you're wondering what are we doing for the AA and title two or perhaps you're sharing this out or you need to, share this with other folks on your team or in your organization, there's, an article there that that you can access as well.

Other than that, you're always welcome to reach out to us at accessibility at EBSCO dot com. And we actually finished a few minutes early. Cody is usually, a little bit more verbose, but he tied it up pretty quick. So we've got a little bit more time for questions, which is great. So, Hannah, are there questions that we want to start with?

Hannah Murphy

Yes. We've had a bunch of questions come in. So just as a friendly reminder as we're going through them, if you see any questions in the chat that you'd like us to ask, please make sure you like them. That will, boost them to the top. And any questions we don't have time to answer, someone will be in touch with you. So, Amber, our first and most popular question was asking if these slides will be available so they can share them with their colleagues after this presentation.

Amber Russell

Yep. Absolutely. That will be no problem. Is that something you would send out, Hannah?

Hannah Murphy

Yes. Anyone who, signed up for our webinar today, will receive a recording of today's session, and those slides will be included as well.

Amber Russell

Great. I also received a question from someone for the transcript. So my understanding is if you access that now or maybe before you leave the meeting, it seems you can download that. I don't know if that will be included in what you are sending out to, Hannah.

Hannah Murphy

I believe it will be as well. Yes. Great. Okay. I'm looking through some of our other questions.

What about compliance for the third-party products you provided subscriptions to since those are different platforms? So examples that were listed were BlueCareer, LearningExpress, Rosetta Stone, etcetera. Are you auditing those, or are you able to provide contacts for libraries to reach out to those third parties?

Amber Russell

Oh, that's a really good question. So BlueRecruit was just audited, and that ACR is, is listed on the page.

They are a third party-ish. They're kind of we're not really a reseller for them, but we do have the contact that's also listed in the ACR if you needed more information or had specific questions about that.

Please email accessibility at EBSCO.com, and we can give you a little bit more information, if you need something beyond the ACR. Rosetta Stone, we are resellers for, so we don't audit them. They just provided an updated ACR. They do their own testing, and they're responsible for that. Since we don't own the product, we're just a reseller for it. It's not something that that we can really do because we don't have the ability to make changes.

What was the third product?

Cody Care

LearningExpress.

Amber Russell

Oh, thank you. So LearningExpress, now known as EBSCOLearning, they are an EBSCO product. So, yes, they are audited by us, or the LearningExpress team. Actually, a third party that is hired by the LearningExpress team. And we work with them and provide support, and they come to our accessibility office hours, and we collaborate with them as well. So though they are within the EBSCO ecosystem.

Cody Care

I oops. Sorry.

Amber Russell

Yeah. Go ahead.

Cody Care

I was just going to say I am excited to say I am starting to work with them more closely internally. We will be doing, like, a high-level internal audit internally to start, like, narrowing down on some big pain points. So that'll be a lot of fun.

Amber Russell

Yeah.

Hannah Murphy

Awesome. Thank you both. Another question we have is, can librarians submit accessibility support requests for an accessible version of a document on behalf of a patron or faculty member?

Amber Russell

Absolutely. Yep.

While it is easier for, for our remediation team and usually quicker, if you use the form to submit those requests, it goes directly to our remediation team. We have had, some librarians and some instructors that will reach out to us directly. Maybe they've got a course coming up, and they've got, you know, a list of content that they're going to need for that course. And so that's another way to do it too if you've got, you know, a large list. But yes. Absolutely.

Hannah Murphy

Awesome.

Thank you. Next question I see is, so if we search EBSCO and the content article, we find the interface will have the a eleven y button on the right, where can we, where we can request remediation for that article. Can all users request that, or is it only the staff members?

Amber Russell

Any user.

Any user. Yeah. That's it's not shown or hidden, for anyone. So as long as your organization, whoever is accessing, owns that content, meaning subscribes to it, has access to it, then you can request it.

It is for users with disabilities. So if you just, want a Word document, then we would ask you to not use that because it does the resources are for, for compliance and for users with disabilities, not just, oh, I want a download of the Word document.

That that uses our resources. So I would just ask that that you don't abuse it, please.

Hannah Murphy

Another question I see here is, can you remind us of the date for the planned navigation change?

Amber Russell

So right now, it is July. Designs are not totally final yet. Development work is being scoped out. So it's it's planned for July. And I will say that it's software development, so it could be a bit earlier and it could be a bit later.

But that's all I know.

Hannah Murphy

Yes. Okay. Some, another clarification question. What do you mean by can meet 2.1 or 2.2 and still have an inaccessible experience? Can you provide an example?

Amber Russell

Yeah. There is a video out there if you search for it, and maybe I can add it when Hannah sends this out. But just meeting the success criteria of WCAG does not guarantee an accessible act experience. It is literally the bare minimum.

So there's actually three levels to WCAG. Probably you know this, maybe not, but there's level A, which you have to do that. Level AA, which is kind of the gold standard. That's what we shoot for, and then there's level AAA. We don't typically test or evaluate against AAA.

EBSCO definitely meets a lot of the triple success, criteria, but you can meet all level A and all level AA and still have a really inaccessible experience. Why? Well, it might not make any sense, but technically, you've met every single one of those criteria. But, perhaps your layout is technically following that, your page reflows. You don't have any contrast errors. And so your code is perfect. It's polished, but you it's not usable.

And so there's a lot of crossover between compliance and usability, but they are not mutually exclusive mutually inclusive, mutually inclusive. So just meeting the success criteria doesn't mean an accessible experience. Also, not meeting all of the success criteria doesn't mean that it's going to be unusable by every single person. The point of WCAG is for it to do the best that it can, very minimum level, of standards to try and create something that is accessible to most people, most people of assistive technologies, most people that might have mobility issues. So, you know, perhaps they can't use a mouse, it's keyboard accessible.

But just meeting WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 at the AA level doesn't ensure that it's going to be accessible or that it's going to be a good user experience.

I hope that helps.

Hannah Murphy

Thank you, Amber. A few more questions I see here. Is it possible to check the accessibility of an e-book before we purchase it from EBSCO?

Amber Russell

So I don't know if Emma is here. That is something that we probably want to follow-up on. They have added, within Mosaic.

If you are purchasing through there, there is, a checkpoint. We also if you go into the e-book details page, there's Ace by Daisy. It does an EPUB check, and so there's automated testing being conducted.

I don't what I'm unsure about, and I don't want to say the wrong thing, is I'm not sure if it's every single e-book at this point

I know it is, EPUBs, but I'm just not sure if it's all of them or, or just front list right now, ahead of the EAA. So I can, I can follow-up if you can let me know who that person is, and have Emma reach out to you, to give a bit more information. But we do checks on that. And most EPUBs are EPUB frees now, which are a very accessible experience.

Hannah Murphy

Thank you. And I may know that we will follow-up on that as well.

There you go. With the accessibility metadata, could users limit their search to resources that meet w's the WCAG standards? I didn't want to pronounce that one wrong. I recommend library resources for course readings, and it would help if I could avoid items that will require mediation.

Amber Russell

So focusing on HTML content is going to be your best bet there. We don't always receive that information from our publishers. So we're adding more metadata as we're able, and we're requesting, publishers send more metadata. But we don't have metadata for every single piece of content at this time.

Hannah Murphy

Thank you. I believe we have, some time for a couple more questions. So just a reminder, if you have questions you'd like us to answer, please put them in the q and a.

Here's one more question for you, Amber. Are you able to provide more of a timeline for when the changes are released and when the third-party audit will be conducted? Will it be prior to the April 2026 deadline? And if not, will you be able to provide documentation for when it will be completed?

Amber Russell

It won't be prior to the April 2026 deadline, because the navigation changes won't be released until July-ish. I'm going to say summer. So we don't want to do a full third-party audit only to have the navigation change, just a couple months later. So I will be doing some more internal testing.

Cody will be doing some internal testing, just to make sure we'll do kind of a new UI, full audit internally and update our ACR prior to April 2026, this April. And then in once navigation changes are released, then we'll have our full third-party audit done as well. Another thing I'll mention is that Library Accessibility Alliance, in December also had they work with DQ, which is the accessibility vendor that we work with. They did an accessibility audit on a couple of our pages as well, and they found a couple minor things, so we'll be folding those into, the ACR updates, prior to April of this year.

Hannah Murphy

Awesome. Thank you. 

Amber Russell

Also, an ACR is an accessibility conformance report.

So oftentimes, you people use ACR or VPAT interchangeably. VPAT is the template that you report an ACR on, but you don't have to report an ACR on the template. It's just kind of the most common one. You can kind of think of it as, tissue and Kleenex. So all, all tissue is tissue, and all Kleenex is also tissue, but all tissue is not Kleenex, if that makes sense. Meaning that you can have an ACR that's not a VPAT because it's not reported on the VPAT template, but all VPATs are ACRs.

Hannah Murphy

Awesome. Okay, I think we have time for one more.

Amber Russell

Yep.

Hannah Murphy

Awesome. Does EBSCO provide HTML alternatives for all PDFs? Will there be situations where PDF is the only content and the library may need to remediate for end users?

Amber Russell

We don't, not because we don't want to, but because the publisher often doesn't provide us, an HTML equivalent. So that is something that we're working on adding more of our HTML full text content and requesting that. But there are definitely going to be, situations where PDF is the only option. And if you did need HTML, then you would want to, request that through the content, request remediation form.

Hannah Murphy

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Okay. I think with that, thank you, Amber and Cody, for your time today, and for answering all of those questions.

We do have a few more questions, so we'll be sure to reach out to everyone whose questions we didn't have time to answer today.

Thank you again to everyone for joining us today. We hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

Amber Russell

Thank you, everybody.

Cody Care

Thanks, everyone. Have a wonderful day.

Hannah Murphy

Bye.