TO ADD: Kazuye Kimura (2018)

 Kazuye Kimura (2018)

The librarian profession have always expressed a commitment of facilitating access to information for all individuals of all abilities. For example in the US long before the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act libraries offered blind users embossed books. They have always played a vital role in society to ensure the social justice of access to information and inclusivity to distribute materials for those with print impairments.

Digital technology has now opened that world even further. However despite regulations and guidelines many online resources in libraries remain inaccessible to those on assistive technologies such as screen readers.

The root of the problem is that accessibility tends to be reactive rather than proactive, in that it is retrospectively applied, not built into the process of creating materials.

An accessible resource according to the social model of disability is one that does not present barriers to access. In the built environment this could mean ramps instead of stairs or tactile and audible warning devices at street crossings. #In the digital world it refers to…

Legislation makes it easy to see accessibility as a set of compliance guidelines that refer to checklists such as WCAG that can make accessibility feel like a ‘technical puzzle’ and one that can be ‘solved’ by checking underlying code (p.428).

However, true accessibility is a matter of social justice in the same way we think about diversity and fostering inclusive practices and understanding others needs, where all groups that are underrepresented, disadvantaged or underserved can still access and use digital information, which is imperative in a just society in the 21st century (Jaeger et al, 2011).

Rosen (2017) sees the working definition of accessibility as a design philosophy that captures the needs and experiences of people with disabilities as applicable to every aspect of librarianship from the environment, hiring, services, library collections and catalogues.

From a pragmatic standpoint the legal guidelines such as the WCAG criteria provide a useful place to start but meaningful accessibility goes much further.

Yesilada et al (2015) conducted over 300 interviews with people discussing the topic of accessibility and the WCAG guidelines. The results indicated that whilst they found little agreement on what web accessibility means, there was significant agreement that the WCAG guidelines on their own do not suffice, even though they are considered the gold standard by which web accessibility is measured. 

Checklists are difficult to interpret and maybe deceiving for a true account of the accessibility of digital content. For example a site that ticks all of the WCAG boxes for accessibility might not actually be usable for someone with disabilities.

Yoon et al (2016a; 2016b) confirm that numbers and checklists do not always reflect true accessibility. They conducted a side by side comparison study of using automated checking tools on library websites and compared findings with six visually impaired user testers and found that there was little correlation between the automated checking tools and the problems the users actually faced. Using the approach of using only automated tools one could argue runs the risk of engaging with ‘token accessibility over true accessibility’ Kazuye Kimura (2018).

Barriers in inaccessible content still remains widespread in libraries and the obstacle of progress in this area is often associated with cost, time and lack of understanding (Conway, 2011; Ekwelen, 2013; Hunsucker, 2013; Billingham, 2014) as well as librarians themselves having little input into decision making, library policy or choice of vendors for procurement (Jaeger et al, 2012).

Instead of focusing on retro fixes and remediation, what if these barriers were never created in the first place and digital content was ‘born accessible’ with a user-centred universal design process at the core of their development (p.432).

To ensure library resources are truly inclusive there needs to be digital accessibility awareness training or education for library staff, librarians and resource creators (Fallon, 2015; Small et al, 2015; Brannen et al, 2017; Mulliken and Djenno, 2017).

The bigger picture in libraries however is moving away from individual education to organisational strategy to make accessibility part of the culture for social justice (Rosen, 2017).

We need to question the facts of accessibility data and examine the real users and experiences that lie behind it.

The inclusive concept of accessibility cannot just be addressing through purely technical means, we need to engage actively with people at every stage of designing content and services to adhere to meaningful accessibility and conditions in which all library users can succeed (p.433).

#Me - The reduction of disability needs to a technical ‘gold standard’ checklist and being reliant on automated tools to measure accessibility is far removed from the disabled community’s request of ‘nothing about us without us’. Studies show that in comparison between automated tools and real user testing this highlights disparities that automated checkers are somewhat unreliable. Add to that the difficulties interpreting the WCAG criteria (ref) and that these are complex for beginners (ref) it highlights the importance in education of the awareness of users and their diverse needs. This has been an important factor left out of most workplace practices which in the end means a culture of being an add-on of retrofit fixes that are complex, time consuming and costly, often reinforcing and perpetuating the perception that accessibility is a complex specialist role.

Many simple accessibility principles can be easily built into the development process of digital content to reduce the needs for fixing or duplicating efforts at the end, many of which are simple such as headings, alt text, descriptive links, tables that avoid merged and split cells, colours and contrast, labelling codes and logical reading order, all described as easy to adopt skills or the low hanging fruit that can make a real difference (ref). Adopting these basic principles can help to make basic content ‘born accessible’ (ref) especially when applied from the start and throughout the creation of content, rather than fixed at the end. In document creation especially this can save considerable remediation time. It is these simple skills principles that can be easy to adopt and ideal to implement in foundational education and awareness for digital accessibility, especially as young people learn routine practices for creating digital content.