This important summer project elevated user accessibility for our main library web pages to meet the standard set forth by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from the ADA. According to the World Wide Web Consortium, website accessibility is the practice of removing barriers so people with disabilities can “perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the web”. We are committed to ensuring all visitors have equal access to our website content. Automated tests were run on the main library website to identify potential user accessibility problems present on each page. The test identified 8,054 violations which were addressed systematically from highest to lowest impact. Remediation included adding text to describe images, including more descriptors in links, improving landmarks, and ensuring forms have very descriptive labels.
The team will soon run manual tests on our main library web pages, implement this workflow to check our other library websites for accessibility errors, and train the library staff on how to create accessible content for the web.