University of South Carolina (University of South Carolina, School of Library and Information Science)

To better serve Blind, Visually Impaired, and Print-Disabled (BVIPD) students enrolled in online courses, the University of South Carolina will develop a partnership model for Disabilities Services Offices (DSOs) to work with academic libraries. Currently, most published literature is not available to students in BVIPD-accessible formats, making online learning environments inaccessible. The project will use a mixed method approach to collect data from the 14 institutions in the Southeastern Conference to understand: 1) how familiar DSOs and academic libraries are with current legal infrastructure regarding accessibility for BVIPD students; 2) how DSOs work with academic libraries to support BVIPD students; and 3) the current experiences of BVIPD students using the existing services. The result will be a proposed DSO-Academic Libraries partnership model that demonstrates how DSOs can build workflows using the existing legal infrastructure to make content accessible for BVIPD students.