What can faculty/staff do to minimize potential barriers when using library resources?

The Shapiro Library at Southern New Hampshire University is committed to providing all SNHU students, faculty, and staff equitable access to the library resources and services they require for academic and research needs. Shapiro Library maintains contracts with many vendors for widely different systems and resources in order to meet the needs of the SNHU community. Though we try to ensure systems are as accessible as possible and have workflows for remediating resources, users accessing these systems may encounter barriers.  

The accessibility center is very experienced at getting students what they need, and the library has established practices for working with our vendors to remediate resources as needed, but faculty and instructional designer attention to potential accessibility issues when choosing resources for courses can reduce the load on these teams and processes, ensuring students can get the resources they need quickly. 

Here are some best practices to reduce barriers when asking users to access library materials: 

• Link to detailed item records for library resources. For more information about linking to item record pages, view the How do I know I’m linking to the best page for this resource? FAQ
• Evaluate resources for potential accessibility issues 
  • Are multiple formats available? 
  • Are historical primary sources available as images and transcripts? 
  • Do videos include captions? 
  • It can be difficult to tell if PDFs are accessible, but you can check them for common issues with a screen reader, free tools like PAVE, or adobe acrobat pro.