eBooks at Reed

Publisher platforms can vary in quality of accessibility, but the major aggregators support ebook accessibility in the following ways.

EBSCOhost

EBSCO's platform presents ebooks in two formats, PDF and EPUB (many books are available in both formats, but some are available only in one format). EPUB format books are recommended for use with screen readers, but PDF format books should be compatible with screen readers using an ASCII text layer.

Partial book downloads (like pages or chapters) are free of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and may be read using any PDF reader tool. On the other hand, most full book downloads are protected by DRM that requires you to use Adobe Digital Editions reader (thus "checking out" the ebook). Adobe Digital Editions is free and available for desktop or mobile download. iOS and Android users also have the option to use the EBSCO Mobile app to download both DRM-protected and DRM-free ebooks.

If you use a screen reader, we recommend accessing the EPUB format whenever possible while you are browsing. This prevents you from encountering daily page limitations on downloads while you are still in investigation mode, so you can save your downloads and checkouts for the material that is most valuable to you.

See also

• The EBSCO eBook Accessibility User Guide and FAQs has a wealth of information about accessibility, including suggestions for different types of users, an FAQ, and notes on future feature development.
• You may also be interested in their Navigation Guide, which focuses on three major screen readers (NVDA, JAWS, and VoiceOver) and also offers guidance for Braille Display.

JSTOR

JSTOR content is available as scanned images and as PDFs. A subset of the content is available in HTML format. JSTOR does not use any form of DRM on their platform, so you will not see page limits for downloading content. JSTOR PDF files are expected to be usable with screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver, but they say that their files are tagged using an automated process. If you encounter an error in an article’s optical character recognition or tagging that impacts screen reading, please let us know! We can report it to JSTOR for remediation.

ProQuest Ebook Central

As with EBSCO, Ebook Central books are available for online reading in two different formats: PDF and EPUB. Depending on the format of the book, you will have a different experience in the online reader.

EPUB format ebooks are natively accessible to screen readers, but to read ProQuest's PDF books with a screen reader, you will need to enable Text Only Mode in your personal Ebook Central account. Select the Sign In button in the upper right corner to make sure you are signed in.

When you access Ebook Central using a screen reader, your screen reader should automatically read out instructions for turning on Text Only Mode. If that does not happen, you can enable it by selecting Profile from the top navigation menu. Once turned on, the online reader interface changes to a text-based view and you can use the screen reader to read the text on the screen and control navigation.

Partial book downloads (like pages or chapters) are free of Digital Rights Management and may be read using any PDF reader tool. On the other hand, most full book downloads are protected by DRM that requires you to use Adobe Digital Editions reader (thus "checking out" the ebook). Adobe Digital Editions is free and available for desktop or mobile download.

See also

• For much more detailed information, including about support for the OpenDyslexic typeface, visit ProQuest's Accessibility Statement.
• If you want a fuller explanation of the difference in the two ebook formats, please visit the page What are the differences between EPUB and PDF ebooks when reading online on Ebook Central?