The Libraries are working on a number of projects that address accessibility issues for persons with print disabilities or whose disabilities do not allow them to use printed books. Individuals on campus – students, faculty or staff – with a print disability can now request electronic copies of more than 14 million titles held in the HathiTrust digital preservation repository. Housed at the University of Michigan, HathiTrust is a partnership of over 100 libraries from around the world dedicated to preserving our cultural record. Vanderbilt University, as a partner organization, can now share these digitized collections of some of the nation’s great research libraries with eligible persons with print disabilities. This access even includes copyrighted materials that would not normally be available to our library users. Instructions for users with print disabilities are available here.
The Libraries are also adding JAWS (Job Access with Speech) and NVDA (Nonvisual Desktop Access) software to workstations and laptops in the libraries. These screen reader programs provide spoken content for web resources.