(This article was updated in June 2025)

The Accessible Text Request Service (ATRS) is an unique HathiTrust service that allows its member institutions to accommodate special access to any HathiTrust volume (regardless of rights status) for their students, researchers, and staff who are blind or have print disabilities. As HathiTrust members, each UC campus may set up ATRS at their library or disability services center (or both). (ATRS allows for up to three authorized service providers from each UC campus.) The service providers have the ability to download digital files that are readable by screen readers and other forms of assistive technology to share with eligible patrons. 


Eligibility

HathiTrust defines print disabilities as any disability that prevents a person from being able to read a print book, such as vision impairment, cognitive impairments, learning disabilities, physical disability, etc. However, HathiTrust does not determine who qualifies as print disabled; each member institution must have its own defined process for certifying eligible patrons. ATRS is not yet established on all ten UC campuses; UC libraries may want to work with the disability resource or services center on their campus to make this service available to their users.


Benefits of ATRS

The benefits of ATRS participation include:

  • Access to HathiTrust’s entire corpus of over 18 million volumes (or roughly 8 million titles).
  • Access to rare or older material and content in non-English languages that are difficult to find in digital formats elsewhere.
  • The delivery of scholarly content in digitally accessible formats.
  • The reduced impact on staff time - ATRS often eliminates the need to scan books for local use. 


Quality of Digital Files

The quality and utility of the files available via ATRS is dependent on the quality of the OCR text extracted from the digitized volume, which in turn has a significant impact on the efficacy of assistive technologies, like screen readers. The OCR text for volumes written in languages that are unsupported or poorly supported by OCR technologies (including handwritten manuscripts) can be very poor or even completely unusable. The majority of books in HathiTrust have been digitized by the Google Books Library Project, and as Google continues to improve its OCR technology over time, can be reprocessed to improve the OCR text quality. Poor OCR text found in the HathiTrust Digital Library can often be remedied by reporting the issue to the HathiTrust Support team (support@hathitrust.org), who can work with Google to try to improve its quality.


April 2025 Webinar

In April 2025, HathiTrust offered a webinar Getting Started with Accessible Text Request Service, in which HathiTrust staff detailed how the ATRS service works and what is required to get it set up. The webinar also featured accounts from librarians at Harvard University and the University of Iowa of their success using ATRS for a number of years. Each institution has created different procedures for the use of ATRS, and they both report positive results, including that ATRS often obviates the need for them to scan entire books or hunt for ebooks to purchase. They report that ATRS is fast, and it allows service providers to authenticate and download the books from anywhere, including when working from home. When asked how HathiTrust could improve the ATRS service, the librarians responded only with praise, reporting that the file quality is good, that it allows them to deliver an entire book to a patron within a day, and that students are really appreciative of the service.


ATRS at UC

Eight of the UC campuses have an institutional contact for ATRS. For those who have implemented the service, we would love to hear how ATRS is working out at your UC campus. How often are you using it? Has it saved staff time? Have you had issues with file quality or the use of assistive technologies? Do you have suggestions for how to improve the service? Please drop us a line and let us know!  


Additional Resources

On HathiTrust: