Web accessibility trends in university libraries and library schools

Purpose – Only properly designed web sites are accessible to people with print disabilities. The purpose of this paper is to follow up on earlier investigations of this kind by looking at the web sites of all 56 ALA‐accredited library schools, and of the libraries on these campuses.Design/methodology/approach – Bobby 3.1.1 was used to evaluate compliance with major accessible web design guidelines. In addition, key web pages were checked manually for the presence of skip‐navigation components, and the sites' re‐design status was ascertained. The results were presented in the form of basic descriptive statistics, including percentages of Bobby‐approved pages and the average number of barriers per page. Correlations of the current accessibility data with older data sets and with library school ratings were also calculated.Findings – The results indicate that despite an increase in accessibility, only 50 to 60 per cent of the web sites were free of Bobby‐detectable errors. Canadian sites were more accessible...

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