Vireo Accessibility

The Vireo ETD application is an open source application developed by a community of developers coordinated by the Texas Digital Library (TDL), a unit within the University of Texas at Austin Libraries. TDL is a collaborative consortium of higher education institutions that have pooled their resources to provide shared infrastructure for libraries and higher ed institutions. 

TDL member institutions using the Vireo ETD system are responsible for ensuring that PDFs and other documents uploaded to the system (and which may be published to their institutional repository platforms) are compliant with WCAG guidelines. Member institutions are also responsible for maintaining theme settings that retain sufficient color contrast, and for maintaining alt text for uploaded logos or other images in customized CSS.

In addition to its efforts to bring the Vireo application into full compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines, TDL has coordinated efforts among its community of higher education users to address accessibility of the documents (i.e. theses and dissertations) submitted via Vireo and subsequently published to institutional repositories. See Vireo Users Group Accessibility Task Force.

Remediation Plans

Texas Digital Library is committed to ensuring that its hosted software applications and websites are accessible to all users, including people with disabilities. Our target conformance level is WCAG 2.1 AA by the federally mandated deadline of April 26, 2027.

Remediation of identified barriers is on-going. Our development priority is the remediation of those issues affecting the application’s student submission interface, which affect the largest number of users by far. These include reviewing and remediating skipped heading levels (impacting WCAG criteria 1.3.1, 1.3.2 and 2.4.6), the addition of programmatically associated status messages for submission completion and file upload (WCAG 4.1.3), and review and resolution of name, role and value issues (WCAG 4.1.2). Secondary priorities are those affecting the admin interface, including the addition of skip links on admin pages (2.4.1), adding missing alt text for glyphicons (WCAG 1.1.1), and addressing keyboard accessibility issues (WCAG 2.1.1).

Progress will be tracked through the GitHub issues (tagged with an accessibility label) linked in the table above and the conformance reports will be updated as issues are resolved. 

Alongside these remediation efforts for the current iteration of the platform, the Vireo Open Source Software Community is launching a major development effort for Vireo version 5 in late 2026 (Vireo 5 Roadmap), which includes “accessibility by design” as a core development principle, understanding that accessibility must be considered at the architectural level and not merely retrofitted. A target date for Vireo 5 release has not been determined, and will be dependent on engagement from the open source community of developers.

Also see thehttps://texasdigitallibrary.atlassian.net/wiki/x/BwDh5w, collecting resources and recommendations for managing accessibility of your ETD content.

Accessibility Conformance Reports

Vireo 4.3.3 VPAT -

Vireo 4.3.1 VPAT -