The Law and Accessible Texts: Reconciling Civil Rights and Copyrights

This report was written as part of Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Education, a project supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is based in part on discussions at a meeting held in January 2019 at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) offices in Washington, D.C.

This report is written to inform the participants in a new collaborative project to improve how accessible texts (i.e., texts in formats that meet the needs of users with disabilities) are created, managed, and stored. It provides a concise, up-to-date summary of the two key legal pressures that bear on the creation and sharing of accessible texts: the civil rights laws that require creation and distribution of accessible texts by IHEs to ensure equitable access to information, and the copyright laws that are sometimes misperceived as barriers to that effort.