November 8, 2017
This year’s National Acquisitions Group (NAG) Award for Excellence has been won by the e-book accessibility audit team. Their project sought to introduce a benchmark for accessibility in e-book platforms by devising a comprehensive audit for e-books in Higher Education. The focus was on key areas of practical user experience to measure basic accessibility functionality and guide targeted platform improvement.
The team, made up of Huw Alexander, Jane Cooke, Vicky Dobson, Gopal Dutta, Ruth MacMullen, Alistair McNaught, Jamie Phillips, Sue Smith and Ben Watson, crowd-sourced participation from 33 universities and 5 suppliers, testing 280 e-books across 44 platforms.
Vicky Dobson and Ben Watson, on behalf of the team, said:
“The team are delighted to have won the NAG Award for Excellence. We feel it demonstrates an increasing recognition of the importance of making e-books accessible at source and the impact that not doing so has on the ability of students with disabilities to succeed at university.
We look forward to continuing to build on the excellent engagement demonstrated by platform providers so far and working with them to further embed accessibility by design in e-book platforms across the Higher Education community.”
Results from the audit have been shared widely, amongst both libraries and e-book suppliers, leading to positive conversations between suppliers and libraries. The team continues to develop the audit, with a view to compiling individual feedback for interested platforms.
Stephanie Enderby, Marketing Communications Officer at Nielsen Book, commented “Nielsen Book is delighted to sponsor the NAG award for the seventh year. The NAG Award offers a great opportunity to recognise and celebrate success and innovation within library acquisitions. Nielsen Book would like to thank NAG and the judging panel for their work and to warmly congratulate the e-book accessibility audit team for their achievement. This is an important project and we are delighted to be supporting it and look forward to hearing how the audit develops in the future.”
