Research Guides: Accessibility at the Healey Library: Databases

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ADA Accessibility Features in Major Databases

The majority of the library databases come from three companies, EBSCO, Gale and ProQuest. These database vendors are compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and/or W3C WAI WCAG 2.0. They also provide information about their accessible features.

Please contact us if you are experiencing difficulties with any of our databases.

EBSCO

All EBSCOhost databases provide a text to speech option for HTML Full Text articles. However, many articles are not available in HTML. When you have located an article, click on HTML Full Text and there will be an option to listen. You can also download these audio files in MP3 format.

Newer PDFs in EBSCO are ADA compliant. EBSCO Publishing began providing its scanned PDFs with an Optical Character Reader (OCR) text layer in September 2004. For assistance with older pdfs, contact the reference librarians at library.reference@umb.edu or 617.287.5940.

For more information

Gale

Gale Databases (such as Academic OneFile or the New York Times) provide a Listen function for full-text articles. Wherever the Listen icon is present, there is the option to have the document read aloud. The Listen tool also allows you to download the audio file as a MP3.

For more information

Gale's Electronic Product Accessibility Policy

ProQuest

ProQuest databases contain many PDFs which are ADA compliant. However, older content was created from scanned images of original text that is not accessible to screen readers. This content is identified throughout ProQuest with the label 'Scanned image PDF.' For assistance with older pdfs, contact Library Reference at 617.287.5940 or library.reference@umb.edu.

Other ADA Compliant Databases

The following databases provide policies or statements which express ADA compliance.

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Digital Library / Portal This link opens in a new window
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library Portal includes the ACM Digital library with full text access to all ACM journals, newsletters, conference proceedings, and the Guide to Computing Literature.
* The Guide to Computing Literature provides comprehensive bibliographic coverage for the field of computer science. It indexes all ACM publications plus computing literature from other publishers. It covers books, journal articles, conference proceedings, dissertations and theses, and technical reports.
Anthropology Plus This link opens in a new window
This database offers worldwide indexing of all core periodical and lesser-known journals from the early 19th century to today, providing extensive indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, interdisciplinary studies, etc.
Cambridge Companions Online This link opens in a new window
Cambridge Companion series covers the fields of literature, classics, philosophy, religion, and cultural studies. Each Companion includes essays devoted to a particular person or subject such as Freud, Hemingway, modern Latin American culture, and the African American novel.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Credo Reference provides access to a broad variety of reference sources from dictionaries to encyclopedias covering topics from the arts to the sciences. It has an image collection, maps, customizable data, and audio pronunciation files. You can search the whole collection or a specific subject area.

JSTOR Accessibility

Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis) This link opens in a new window
Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis ®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
The Oxford Art Online is a comprehensive art reference collection that covers all the visual arts from prehistory to the 1990's. Through the Oxford Art Online gateway you can search the Grove Art Online encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, the Oxford Companion to Western Art, and the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms together or individually.
5 concurrent users at a time
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) This link opens in a new window
The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past.
Oxford Music Online This link opens in a new window
Through the Oxford Music Online gateway you can search Grove Music Online, the Oxford Dictionary of Music, and the Oxford Companion to Music as a group or individually. Together these works form a comprehensive site where you can find information on composers, musical styles, and major musical works
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Project Muse provides an online collection of scholarly peer-reviewed journals in the humanities and social sciences from not-for-profit publishers.
ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window
ScienceDirect provides full text online access to over 4500 Elsevier journals and ebooks. The Backfiles program offers the ability to search a historical archive of over 6.75 million articles. This set of journals is a key component of Healey Library's online scholarly journal collection.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Web of Science is a research platform that gives you access to objective content and powerful tools to search, track, measure and collaborate in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. This intelligent research platform provides access to the world's leading citation databases, including powerful cited reference searching, the Analyze Tool, and over 100 years of comprehensive backfile and citation data. Includes Emerging Sources Citation Index: 2005-present

Database Accessibility: Further Resources

Library Accessibility Alliance Evaluations
The Library Accessibility Alliance provides in depth accessibility reports of common library products and databases, and vendor responses when given.

University of Washington Library E-Resource Accessibility Testing
Accessibility Testing Results for many common library products. This site does keyboard navigation testing, in which a resource that fails the keyboard test is unusable with assistive technology. This testing asks:
- Perform Search: Can I perform a search using keyboard navigation? yes or no.
- Retrieve Result: Can I select a result using keyboard navigation? yes or no.
- Use Result: Can I use the result (scroll, turn pages, etc) using keyboard navigation? yes or no.
- Basic Compliance: Yes marked in all three columns (perform search, retrieve result, use result) yes or no.