FRAME: Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education A new collaborative framework

Abstract

Most colleges and universities offer services at their institution for students with disabilities who cannot properly utilize the standard available resources. Often the student needing the remediated resource does not obtain it until the semester is up and running, putting them significantly behind the other students in the course. This paper discusses a multi-institutional project at the University of Virginia that was established to address this problem. With a two-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University initiated an effort to create a web-based infrastructure allowing Disability Service Officers to share remediated texts, in order to reduce their nationwide duplication of effort, and thereby make it possible for the staff in these offices to achieve better outcomes for students in higher education.