I am proud of the tremendous progress that we have made in the accessibility of our products, and, even more critical, the outstanding progress the entire ecosystem has made in creating and adopting standards. As I have often written in this blog, we are grounded in the principle that having a reading system and a platform that supports accessibility is critical. However, without the support of content that has the necessary markup, it may not provide the accommodations a learner needs.

Transparency that empowers was the blog post in which we announced our initial efforts to provide a clear understanding of the claims a publisher makes about accessibility to a learner, even before purchasing or accessing the content. Since that announcement, we have seen the support for this initiative grow so that today we have more than 65,000 titles from more than 200 publishers now displaying detailed accessibility metadata in our storefronts, our white label stores, our catalog feeds, and our sampling sites. While this is exciting progress, we know that VitalSource can do more for the community…so we are.

Right now, we are working with every single one of our publishing partners to help them understand how to provide this critical accessibility metadata, and later this summer, we will be including it for every one of the 1.5 million titles in our catalog that we distribute and provide access to. It is critical that the course materials needed to succeed are built for every learner, and it is equally critical that those learners know which materials are accessible. On the VitalSource platform, you will have the confidence and assurance to clearly know which titles have the accessibility markup you need, and which titles do not.

Accessibility accommodation is a key capability that our learners always want to know more details about. For more than 20 years, VitalSource has partnered with publishers to ensure a complete picture is available for how their content and our platforms work together to provide this transparency. Later this year, we will add new capabilities that allow searching and filtering on key accessibility metadata, expand the ability to identify PDF titles that have accessibility markup within them and make this information visible in even more parts of our platform.

The goal of these updates is to take the guess work out of finding accessible materials for faculty and students. We believe now, and always have, that digital should work for everyone and that it is our job to make that happen for learners.

For more on our commitment to accessibility, visit our Accessibility hub.