Accessibility and Library Materials

At Alexander Street our motto is, “Making silent voices heard.” This motivates us on many levels—from creating space for marginalized voices within our collections, to unearthing and digitizing rare and inaccessible archival content, to making our content accessible to all.  We believe that all students and researchers, regardless of dis/ability, deserve to find and use Alexander Street content with ease, and in doing so empowering their own voices.

Our products’ website design complies with the best practices, recommendations, and standards as defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) of the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), as well as the requirements set by Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act.

While not required, our JAWS implementation handles all the features of our platform, enabling sight impaired students clear navigation of our platform and resources.  In addition to the searchable, synchronized transcripts that run alongside our videos, at any given time, more than 80% of our films also include on-screen subtitles (not including archival material such as Dutch newsreels, silent film, and primary footage). We move our videos to the streaming platform rapidly, to give users immediate access. In many instances if a video isn’t captioned, it’s because we’re adding the on-screen text as we go.  

Accessibility is an ever-changing and vitally important issue, and Alexander Street is committed to being a leader in this space. 

Here are the accessibility goals we strive for daily:

• To ensure 508 compliance, any user (including those without disabilities) can request a title, and it will be transcribed, on average, within 30 days.
• Any title from the archive with more than 50 views is automatically prioritized to be transcribed, of which 98% of these titles are. The remaining titles are prioritized accordingly. 
• Due to the ever-changing nature of this growing resource, the number of transcribed titles changes rapidly as we can add hundreds of titles per month.
• In total, Alexander Street prides itself by having more than double the number of video transcribed than our competitors.