We make every reasonable effort to ensure our ebooks are available to all readers, especially those with disabilities, allocating significant time and resources towards ensuring readers have equal access.

Last updated: August 25, 2025

Accessible File Requests

To request a file for remediation, please complete the Fulcrum Accessible File Request form.

Conformance Status and VPAT®

Download VPAT®

The majority of the ACLS Humanities Ebook Collection consists of reformatted scholarly monographs that were page scanned from print into digital format, and more recently, available formats supplied by publishers. Our current practice is to prioritize the EPUB3 format over PDF when requesting files from publishers, however due to older publication dates of many titles added to the collection, EPUB formats are often unavailable from publishers. The format and origin will often inform the accessibility of that content:

• PDFs created by reformatting print to digital include page scans with an uncorrected OCR text layer to enable functionality with text-to-speech and assistive technology software. Bookmarks have been added to these PDFs to enable content navigation within reading systems, including the Fulcrum Reader. However, these PDFs do not contain structural markup and tagging to identify document structure such as headings or tables.
• PDFs provided by publishers include OCR or born-digital text, bookmarks, but often do not include structural markup and tagging.
• EPUBs created by reformatting print to digital and include reflowable, structured text. The content of these EPUBs are compatible with assistive technology. Often, these titles are not available for download by chapter. As of August 2025, content reformatted to EPUB3 will conform WCAG 2.2 AA and EPUB Accessibility 1.1 standards.
• EPUBs provided by publishers are converted to EPUB3 and include reflowable, structured text and are compatible with assistive technology. Structural markup and conformance to accessibility standards will vary from publisher to publisher.

Most titles in the collection do not contain textual descriptions of images. Only titles in PDF format are available for chapter download.

Accessibility Roadmap

Beginning in August 2025, accessibility is built into our workflow with the goal of adding accessible titles to the collection. We continue to identify where accessibility can be added, improved, or content that can be remediated. We approach accessibility with the following three areas guiding our roadmap and activities:

• Make it easy to request copies of ebooks (or remediable DRM-free files) that do not meet accessibility requirements for remediation.
• Clearly communicate a book's accessibility conformance and features.
• Provide evidence of a plan to remediate books that do not meet accessibility requirements.

Activity	Outcome	Timeline	Status
Develop remediation workflow and remediate Round 22 titles	Workflow established to ensure future titles added to collection meet accessibility conformance requirements. Using upcoming batch of nearly 80 titles as a use case for developing workflow.	Q3/Q4 2025	In progress
Reformat high usage titles to accessible EPUB	Prioritizes remediation and reformatting of high-use PDF content to accessible EPUB, including working with publishers to procure EPUB files that may be available.	Q3/Q4 2025	In progress
Create title-level accessibility conformance tracker for all HEB titles	A publicly available spreadsheet with title-level accessibility and format information organized by product year.	Q4 2025	In progress
Add title-level accessibility metadata for PDF content	Complete accessibility metadata for all titles in HEB.	Q1 2026	Planned

Known Issues

The table below documents known accessibility issues with ACLS HEB content and provides workarounds and plans for resolving the known issues. In some cases, issues may be deferred and the documented workaround should be used to resolve the issue.

Issue	Current Status	Timeline	Workarounds
PDF ebooks and PDF chapter downloads are missing image descriptions	Open	Deferred	Image descriptions can be added by request to fulcrum-accessibility@umich.edu.
PDF ebooks and PDF chapter downloads are missing headings, are untagged, and do not contain language identification.	Open	Deferred	Document structure and language tagging can be added by request to fulcrum-accessibility@umich.edu.

Contact

If you have questions about our accessibility activities or feedback, email us at fulcrum-accessibility@umich.edu.