Accessible Civil Rights Heritage Project

FAIN: PR-263888-19

Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH 03755-1808)
Mark J. Williams (Project Director: June 2018 to January 2026)

The development of processes and guidelines to facilitate the use of historical film and video from the civil rights era, with a focus on enabling access for blind and visually impaired users.

The Accessible Civil Rights Heritage (ACRH) Tier II proposal seeks to develop processes and guidelines supporting the delivery of annotated archival video to the higher education community with a particular focus on blind and visually impaired (BVI) users. The ACRH project will research the creation, curation, and consumption of online humanities collections by developing a test corpus of culturally significant newsfilm on American civil rights, dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. ACRH will then combine the deep knowledge of experts on the era with the work of archivists and human-cognition researchers to develop new cataloging and access procedures that deliver high-quality, meaningful experiences to BVI users about culturally significant material. The team will produce evidence-based accessibility guidelines and software that will be published as open resources for use by educators and archivists.