Equal Access to Information? Evaluating the Accessibility of Public Library Web Sites in the State of Maryland

Compliance of Section 508 in public library systems with the largest percentage of underserved populations

“…Those studies conduct such tests for Web sites of public libraries, colleges or universities, and academic libraries. Recently, since 2010, there have been few studies discussing public library website accessibility: most of previous studies have been done a decade before (Lazar et al, 2012). Lilly and Fleet (2000) investigated the accessibility of the websites from one hundred public libraries, selected from the Hennen's American Public Library Rating index.…”

“…Stewart, Narendra, and Schmetzke (2005) evaluated the compliance with Section 508, WCAG, and usability of Web-based indexes and databases of academic libraries for people using adaptive technologies, and found that the accessibility of most online library resources were overall high, whereas the level of their usability for people with disabilities were low. Lazar et al (2012) identified three most common accessibility errors among public library websites in Maryland in terms of Section 508; (a) A text must be equivalent for a graphical element, (n) any electronic form must be accessible and properly labeled), and (o) A webpage must have a method to allow a user to skip repetitive navigation. With similar findings, Wentz et al (2012) suggested that the Section 508 violation can be easily corrected by adding alternative text, appropriate labels, and headers to tales.…”

“…Previous studies have discussed the accessibility issue on websites in general (including libraries) (Brobst, 2009;Byerley & Chambers, 2002;Curl & Bowers, 2009;Farrelly, 2011;Green & Huprich, 2009;Lazar et al, 2012;Lilly & Fleet, 2000;Mates, 2004;Providenti & Zai, 2007b;Schmetzke & Comeaux, 2009;Wentz, Cirba, Kharal, Moran, & Slate, 2012;Yu & Lau, 2006), or on government websites (Abu-Doush, Bany-Mohammed, Ali, & Al-Betar, 2013;Brobst, 2012;Jaeger, 2004Jaeger, , 2006Jaeger, , 2008Jaeger & Matteson, 2009;Jaeger et al, 2013;Lazar et al, 2013). According to previous studies done about a decade ago, there are several critical barriers to compliance with Web accessibility: budget constraints, lacks of perception, skills, and knowledge, and absence of authoritative guidelines (Brophy & Craven, 2007, as cited in Disability Rights Commission (United Kingdom), 2004.…”

Urban Public Libraries Do Not Yet Meet Benchmarks for Web Accessibility by Individuals with Disabilities

“…The first method used in the study was an online evaluation tool for web sites -the WAVE tool -which, while not as powerful as expert inspection (Lazar et al, 2012), creates a consistent and rigorous assessment approach, and increases the quantifiability of and confidence in the evaluation results. However, there was no information about whether any comparisons were done with other tools, or which other tools might have been considered.…”

“…In a similar study examining public libraries in Maryland, each home page was examined by five experienced evaluators, working from an explicit set of guidelines which were included in the article (Lazar et al, 2012). The study author noted only that the sites were explored for certain features such as ease of use by screen readers, with neither indication of who performed the evaluations, nor of a standard list of features which were explored on each site.…”