Gale
Last Updated May 22, 2025.
Accessibility Statement
Gale Databases Available to OCAD Users
Highlights from Accessibility Statement
- Readspeaker audio player available for most articles, eBooks and other types of browser based content.
- Articles are formatted in HTML for improved compatibility for online reading.
- Users can change font, font sizes, colour contrast and text spacing.
- Most Gale content is OCR (optical character recognition) formatted.
- Users can Zoom in up to 200% using browser settings and keyboard controls without encountering elements that users need to use a mouse to navigate away from.
- Users who require access to full books for supplementary research can contact accessibility.gale@cengage.com to request an accessible file format.
What Could Be Inaccessible?
- Downloadable files are only available as PDFs. EPUBs, Word Docs, plain text and other file formats are unavailable.
- OCR converted text from Gale Primary Source archives is not always formatted to include structured metadata and tagging.
- Some archived material lacks WCAG Level A compliant OCR.
- Licensed third-party content and older titles may contain images without alt text or other metadata to describe visual elements.
- Some PDFs do not have accessible text.
- Videos from third-party distributors hosted on external platforms integrated in Gale databases may lack transcripts and accurate closed captions.
- The video player does not provide synchronization of transcripts.
- Topic Finder, Highlights, Notes and other interactive features currently don't allow for error free keyboard-only and screen-reader navigation.
