Angela Colter

American Library Association

May 4, 2009  –  Category: Case Studies

The American Library Association is the oldest and largest national library association in the world, with over 65,000 members in 115 countries. The organization promotes public access to information and provides professional services to members and nonmembers alike. UserWorks had recently redesigned the ALA site when the client decided they wanted an accessibility review to find and remove any obstacles for people with disabilities.

An accessibility review of a small site or application can be a rather painstaking affair. The ALA site presented some additional challenges because:

• It has over 50,000 pages
• There are many, many content owners responsible for their own corner of the site

ALA gave us a dozen or so pages (down from an original count of 80) to review. To make sure that we took a wide variety of disabilities and assistive technologies into account, Jennifer Sutton reviewed the pages using a screen reader, while I tested them using only the keyboard (no mouse), and with CSS, javascript and images disabled.

We found two types of accessibility problems: errors in the design and errors in the content.

The design errors included universal issues like text links that weren’t underlined or the search box’s non-matching for and id attributes. Because these problems reside in the site’s templates and CSS files, they would have to be corrected by the site’s developers.

The content errors included missing or improper alt text, not using header elements to indicate headings, anchor tags with no link text, improper labeling of form controls, and so forth. These errors were introduced by content editors, so they can be corrected by the folks responsible for a specific page. While such content errors are easy to correct, they are also easy to make. For a living site with multiple content editors there will always be a danger of introducing an accessibility barrier, however inadvertently, whenever a page is updated.

We’re currently grappling with the question of how to maintain accessibility across a large site with multiple content editors and varying knowledge of accessibility.

Tags: Deliverables, Expert Review, WCAG 2.0