Educational Materials Made Accessible (EMMA), a repository infrastructure that enables institutions of higher education in the US and Canada to share accessible course content with students and faculty who have print disabilities, ensures equal access to education for persons with disabilities through enhanced knowledge sharing among over 200 EMMA’s member institutions – colleges and research universities in North America region.
Students with disabilities are not always able to access materials needed need for coursework and research in accessible formats in a timely manner. Libraries and disability services offices are responsible for remediating and lending course content in accessible formats for faculty and students with print disabilities, but multiple campuses often remediate the same work; about two thirds of remediated curricular materials are found in multiple campuses’ Learning Management Systems (LMS). When institutions spend time and resources duplicating remediation efforts, they are not providing students with disabilities access to the course materials they need to succeed. This contributes to a system of inequality, in which students with disabilities cannot access course content at the same time as their peers.
To address this issue, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) convened a group of legal experts as part of a project called “Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education” (FRAME project). The FRAME project is a collaboration among academic libraries, repositories, technologists, and disability services offices, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
The work of legal experts resulted in a white paper called “The Law and Accessible Texts: Reconciling Civil Rights and Copyrights,” which documents that there is no legal obstacle to sharing remediated resources with qualified beneficiaries (although contractual terms sometimes prohibit the sharing of remediated works), a common misperception that can lead to barriers for students who need accessible work. Other reasons for the duplication are warning messages that publishers issue instructing institutions to discard accessible works at the end of the semester, or misinformation about what copyright law allows.
Launched in April 2024 at the University of Virginia (UVA), EMMA helps to reduce the duplication of remediated content from one campus to the next. 75 educational institutions signed up as new members within a week after the launch without any marketing or outreach – an indication of the demand for this initiative.
Today, EMMA’s membership includes over 200 community colleges, four-year colleges, and research universities in the US and Canada. Libraries in EMMA member institutions upload batches of remediated files to the repository on a routine basis, so that other campuses can find them and use them.
In addition to supporting institutions in ensuring that students with disabilities can access course materials in a timely manner, EMMA helps improve awareness between libraries and disability services offices (DSOs) about their accessibility activities.
EMMA provides a solution for institutions to fully exercise their rights to create and lend accessible formats under US and Canadian copyright law. EMMA also offers a way that libraries can implement the international Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled (“Marrakesh Treaty”). Nations that ratify the Marrakesh Treaty must amend their copyright law to allow for the creation and cross-border lending of works in accessible formats.
