21 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 302 2021 the infrastructure related to policy, process, and capacity, was insufficient. While there are many legal requirements specifically addressing digital accessibility for people with disabilities, it is important to note that digital accessibility benefits the broader population, not only people with disabilities. First of all, by following technical standards that ensure accessibility, the content also becomes more portable across platforms, browsers, and operating systems. Making digital content or interfaces accessible basically means making them flexible, and everyone benefits from flexible interfaces, as they allow content to be correctly rendered across a broader range of devices and platforms.4 Second, many people who might not consider themselves people with disabilities, are likely to benefit from using accessibility features. A large survey done by Microsoft estimates that 57% of computer users are likely or very likely to benefit from the use of accessibility features.5 Third, there is evidence in the research that making web content accessible makes that content easier for everyone to use.6 So ensuring that digital content, websites, and software are accessible benefits the entire population of users. Due to the pervasive use of captioning on videos by a large percentage of the population (including people in places that are quiet or noisy, people learning English, people who want to search video, etc.), professionally captioned video is already perceived to have wide benefits for the broader population beyond people who are deaf or hard of hearing. But those benefits don’t only occur in the area of captioning, and while there are differences in the definitions of accessibility and universal design, accessibility does have universal benefits.7 3. Planning for Pivoting to Fully Virtual Operations As of late 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be entering another resurgence wave due to the Omicron variant. It is unknown whether there will be new variants or new increases in infection rates, or how often lockdowns will need to take place again in the future. For students with disabilities, the impacts of remote learning, often
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