I’m very excited that the RDAP report “Accessibility for Data and Data Repositories: Understanding and Applying the 2024 ADA Title II Rule” is now available. I was a co-chair of the group that wrote this report, alongside Rachel Woodbrook and Clara Llebot Lorente, and we worked with a fabulous group of peers to write this 100+ page document.
The report is useful for librarians and researchers, as well as anyone else interested in making research data more accessible. While the title frames the report with respect to U.S. disability law, the guidance within the report are broadly applicable to other countries.
Researchers interested in data accessibility should skip to section 4, which is about the accessibility of research data. That section contains a lot of guidance on making data files accessible, from spreadsheets to images to video and textual data. This section provides general guidance by data type and then specific guidance for select file formats within that data type, complete with screenshots on how to implement the guidance. The hope is that by making data accessibility guidance available and easy to follow, researchers can start making their files for accessible.
This report has been a labor of love in an area (data accessibility) where little guidance can be found. I hope that many people find this report helpful. It’s also CC BY licensed, so you are free to reuse this information and share it widely!
