Website Accessibility in Western Australian Public Libraries

This article provides a summary of the research of accessiblity of public library websites in Western Australia. The results showed that none of the 29 websites audited met the basic level criteria of WCAG 1.0 or 2.0 with various errors being detected. Only one library out of 18 gained the lowest score of being up to standard, indicating that only one library was vitually possible for visually-disabled patrons to navigte. In terms of willingness, barriers and conformance of web accessibility guidelines, research showed that libraries were generally unware of the legal and moral necessity to implement relevant features. Time and cost were the two barriers identified as the most mentioned. Moreover, none of the public libraries under study conforms to any level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.