The Gale Primary Sources platform has been developed with great care and attention to accessibility needs. It's compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at the AA level. 

Hear below from Tabetha Kenlon, scholar of early-modern literature, about how Gale Primary Sources meets her needs as a partially sighted scholar.
 

In this video, Tabetha demonstrates how she uses Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and other Gale Primary Sources archives.

In this video, learn more about Tabetha's fascinating research on Conduct Manuals in Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Accessibility features in the Gale Primary Sources platform include:

  • Adjust image feature changes the contrast and brightness, or inverts colours of document images.
  • Ability to zoom via the document viewer.
  • Compatibility with assistive technology such as screen readers.
  • Ability to use a keyboard to navigate the Gale Primary Sources platform without encountering keyboard traps
  • Consistent tagging - Interface elements, such as ARIA regions and links, are consistently tagged so users can easily navigate the site.
  • Plain text/OCR panel allows the primary source content to be read by assistive technology.
  • Icon design – Icons have been designed to be as clear and accessible as possible. For example, icons do not convey information or meaning using colour only: whenever colour is used to convey information, it is paired with an alternative method of conveyance, such as a descriptive word.
  • File download – Ability to download .pdf files of primary source documents, and .txt files of document OCR, which can be read by a screen reader.
  • Transcripts and closed captions of video and audio content. 


Click to download the Gale Primary Sources VPAT: https://assets.cengage.com/gale/vpat/gdc.pdf


This page is specifically about the ways the Gale Primary Sources platform meets the needs of those with differing accessibility needs. To see full accessibility information for all Gale platforms and resources, visit gale.com/accessibility.
 

Image provided by the Connecticut Children’s Aid Society from the Douglas C. McMurtrie Cripples Collection (F54 McM), New York Academy of Medicine Library. Children at the Newington Home for Incurables, Newington, Connecticut, circa 1899.

History of Disabilities archive series

Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century is the first collection in Gale's History of Disabilities series and is sourced from the New York Academy of Medicine. 

Researchers who use a screenreader to access digital primary sources rely on accurate text output, but 100% accuracy is not always possible due to the technical limitations of OCR technology. To optimize the accessibility of the History of Disabilities digital archive, Gale employed a "double OCR, compare, and manual correct" method to ensure at least 98% accuracy in the OCR text included in this archive.

This involved running the text through two OCR engines – Abbyy and Google Vision – after which we compared the output from both engines and made corrections where there were discrepancies.

 

Learn More

Gale Primary Sources Accessibility Updates

Blog Post: Document Viewer Updates

See what’s changed in the document viewer that will benefit your researchers.

All new features described in this blog post are accessible by screen readers.

 

 

Archive Platform Migrations

The following archives recently migrated from legacy platforms to our modern, more accessible interfaces:

State Papers Online (Dec 2022), Early Arabic Printed Books (Mar 2023), British Literary Manuscripts Online (May 2023) Archives of Latin American and Caribbean History, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century (formerly World Scholar: Latin America and the Caribbean, May 2023) and Chatham House Online Archive (Mar 2024).


If you have any feedback or comments about Gale Primary Sources and accessibility, our Product Managers would love to hear from you! Please contact: [email protected].