New NISO Working Group: Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM)

Baltimore, MD | June 14, 2023

Voting members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved the formation of a Working Group to refine and extend the metadata model developed in the Federating Repositories of Accessible Material for Education (FRAME) project, which will enable it to meet broader accessibility needs. NISO is currently seeking members from across the information community to join the resulting Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Working Group. 

People with disabilities—blindness, low vision, dyslexia, deafness, motor impairments, and other conditions—often require accommodations to fully access educational materials such as books, journals, audiovisual content, and other content. On college and university campuses, where these accommodations are required by law, university Disability Services Offices (DSOs) are typically responsible for the remediation—the process of making the appropriate alterations to ensure accessibility for a particular user—of educational materials. Remediation can be a labor-intensive process, conducted at the level of the individual institution, resource, and user. Should a student on one campus require access to a text already sufficiently remediated by another institution, the work is typically duplicated. This can mean that the same work is redone scores or even hundreds of times across colleges and universities.

Recognizing the need for a solution facilitating the discoverability of remediated works, a group of universities developed FRAME. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the FRAME project indexes remediated texts across repositories and enables sharing with authorized users. The FRAME metadata model was developed to make these texts more discoverable and to describe them consistently, providing detailed information on the type of remediations made. 

NISO will further develop and refine FRAME’s work with Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) for remediated texts. The ARM model will ensure that the metadata is machine processable, provide written documentation, and develop a metadata schema. This work will expand the FRAME model to serve a wider range of needs, including those of publishers as well as libraries and DSOs, and make remediated texts even more discoverable.  

Working group co-chair Bill Kasdorf, Principal, Kasdorf and Associates, states, “We are eager to move to the NISO community process, which will include a broad range of stakeholders, to analyze the metadata model developed in FRAME to ensure it is fit for purpose by many parties involved in accessibility remediation, and to put it through the ANSI/NISO standardization process.”

“We are excited to build on the work of FRAME,” says Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Executive Director. “Standardizing the ARM will help ensure that it is easier to provide users with disabilities equal access to educational content, and NISO is proud to support and enable this work.”

For more information and to volunteer to join the ARM Working Group, please contact nisohq@niso.org. 

About NISO
Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.