Accessibility and WCAG Compliance in Higher Education

If a university wants to be recognized in the international academic community, the implementation of inclusive learning is not just a matter of public relations but a necessity. Adapting infrastructure, websites and digital documents to the needs of students and academics with disabilities is also one of the crucial aspects of the Academy's social responsibility. Furthermore, in accordance with the EU regulations (and the regulations of most countries), institutions seeking funding must have websites, applications, and digital documents compliant with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards or at least work on that.

Adapting Institutions to WCAG Standards poses a significant challenge, particularly when it comes to documents and whole repositories. Theses, dissertations, scientific publications, and many others amount to hundreds of thousands of pages covering various fields, consisting not only of text but also charts, images, graphics, formulas, and more. During the webinar, we will discuss how we attempted to tackle this challenge with the help of annotators and AI-based software. We will delve into best practices, the importance of assembling the right team, and key considerations for success.

Opening by Jan Dvořák, euroCRIS President

George Macgregor

Introduction to digital accessibility and WCAG.

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Łukasz Kobyliński

Digital accessibility of documents in the context of WCAG.

Motivation and outlook: how can AI help in digital accessibility of documents.

WCAG AI project introduction: aim of the project and the outcomes.

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Michał Olczyk

Manual annotation of PDF documents: why is it important and how difficult it is.

Antoni Marek

WCAG AI: making PDF documents accessible using Artificial Intelligence

Q&A session

Pablo de Castro works as Open Access Advocacy Librarian at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He is a physicist and an expert in Open Access and research information workflows and management systems, areas he recently explored as coordinator for the OpenAIRE2020 Gold Open Access Pilot at LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries based in The Hague. Since Jan 2018 Pablo also serves as Technical Secretary for the euroCRIS association to promote collaboration across the research information management community.

Jan has been a Board member since 2013. Between 1996 and 2016, Jan was the leader of the team that created and maintained the first generation of the national CRIS in Czechia (IS VaVaI). Since 2016 he works as research information system analyst at the Czech Technical University in Prague. Since 2011 he teaches at the Institute of Information Studies and Librarianship of the Charles University in Prague. Jan’s background is in applied mathematics. Jan has been elected by the Board as the new euroCRIS President for the term 2023/24.

George works as Assistant Director - Digital Libraries at the Information Services Unit at the University of Glasgow. He works and leads on repository and digital library things, while also supporting activities within Open Science, research discovery, and digital scholarship. His background is both as an academic and as a practitioner. He has a PhD in Computer & Information Sciences from the iSchool at the University of Strathclyde, specializing in topics surrounding resource discovery in heterogeneous digital environments. He also happens to be an avid Wikipedian and an advocate of the knowledge commons.