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Back in December 2006 there was some discussion on this list about the accessibilities of items in institutional repositories e.g. see https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0612&L=jisc-repositories&T =0&O=D&F=&S=&P=40351 and http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2006/12/12/accessibility-and-institutional-r epositories/ The discussion highlighted tensions between those who argued that items in repositories should conform with WCAG accessibility guidelines (for legal and ethical reasons) and those who felt that this would be difficult and expensive to implement and would be a barrier to the growth of repositories). In a paper on "Accessibility 2.0: People, Policies and Processes" - see http://opus.bath.ac.uk/398/ - I argued that I agreed with the point that implemented WCAG guidelines was too expensive and difficult (who, for example, is going to retrospectively annotate images?) but, rather than saying we can't do anything, we should be looking for an alternative approaches. Such alternative approaches (which myself and other accessibility researchers and practitioners called an holistic approach to accessibility' have been described in a series of papers. I'm pleased to say that such approaches are now endorsed in the BS 8878 Web Accessibility Code of Practice. This provides a 16 step approach to Web accessibility which focusses on documentation of policies - rather than seeking to achieve 'universal accessibility' in goes for an approach based on 'inclusive design'. It strikes me that it would be timely to provide examples of how BS 8878 could be implemented in the context of institutional repositories. Such case studies could be documented in BS 8878 supporting studies and help to raise the profile of how IRs can enhance access to research publications not only through use of metadata, open licences, etc but also though appropriate and documented policies. Would anyone be interested in doing this? A blog post summarising my thoughts on the BS 8878 Code of Practice is available at: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/bs8878-accessibility-has-been-stu ck-in-a-rut-of-technical-guidelines/ Note also that following paper also describes the approaches we developed and highlights how such approaches can be applied in the context of institutional repositories: Accessibility 2.0: Next Steps For Web Accessibility, Kelly, B., Sloan, D., Brown, S., Seale, J., Smith, S., Lauke, P. and Ball, S. Journal of Access Services, Vol.6 Issue 1 & 2, 2009, pp. 265-294 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/papers/journal-access-services-2009/ Brian -------------------------------- Brian Kelly UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, UK, BA2 7AY Email: [log in to unmask] Phone: +44 1225 383943 Web site: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ Blog: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/briankelly/ Twitter (automated posts): http://twitter.com/ukwebfocus/