BCLA Website Accessibility Guide

Summary

This guide is intended to help library workers identify "more accessible websites (since there are very few, if any, "fully accessible" websites).

I created this guide during my practicum with the British Columbia Library Association (BCLA) that focused on improving accessibility in libraries throughout the province of British Columbia (BC), especially with the advent of the Accessible British Columbia Act (ABCA) and the Accessible Canada Act (ACA).

This guide includes a brief introduction to disabilities and accessibility, a checklist of 6 main things to review when trying to determine if a website is "more accessible" (accessibility information, accessibility scan, animations, media, zoom, and keyboard control), and the results of this checklist when applied to some popular kids' websites.

As this guide was created to be used by library workers who may not be highly technical, and may not have control over the software on their work computer, this guide was intentionally created to be more approachable and understandable than most digital accessibility guides, and the evaluations described do not require the use of any special software or source code inspection.

This guide has been distributed to library workers throughout the province of British Columbia and is also available online through the British Columbia Summer Reading Club (BC SRC) accessibility toolkit.