On-Demand Webinar: 36 Years of ADA – What It Means for Public Sector Websites Today

The best cost-effective way to do that is an automated testing platform. The Recite Me Accessibility Checker can set up a reoccurring scan of your website that will find accessibility issues under WCAG standards and creates a to-do list for you. Our Checker provides context on the severity of the violations which allows you to figure out what issues to prioritize. 

When you have those older documents, books, newspapers, those might not scan in perfectly and our software may struggle to recognize different texts. However, we are always making improvements. 

As a public library, you might be dealing with hundreds of documents that might not scan in perfectly, that is fine and you are taking steps to do what you can. We try to see it more as a journey, where it might take more time to get your documents sorted.

It’s also very important to have a feedback loop. If you do have a person in your community with a disability who needs to access something but can’t, because it is inaccessible, what they can do is use an accessible feedback method to contact your library to get help. What that does is it mitigates any risks you might have of someone not being able to access resources on your website and there’s nothing you can do about it, which is when you can start to get complaints.

It is about mitigating what you can through feedback and prioritizing fixing things that might be more relevant and more important. 

100%, you need to them to be matching. There are very niche exceptions but unless you have a specific case that is an exception, you want your reading order to match your tags order. In addition, you also want your reading order to match your visual order. For example if you are using columns, you need the presumed reading order of an English language user (top to bottom, left to right) to match. 

There’s no set number of years you need to go back. A good rule in accessibility is maintaining compliance, which involves technical standards and can be confusing.

Generally speaking, you know your communities better so you can take a look at what your constituents care about and prioritize those documents, and for older PDFs that you can’t legally remove, you can put those in an archive.  

Including accessibility as part of your procurement program is the best way to get ahead of this. Not just immediately asking a software vendor after you’ve purchased the license, ‘hey is this accessible’; making it so they can’t do business with you; you can’t onboard new vendors; you won’t renew existing contracts; unless those vendors are able to have a documented proof that they are providing you with an accessible solution 

Asking those vendors to provide you with a VPAT. It doesn’t have to be perfect but it is important to know that those issues exist and you have a vendor that knows about it and is working to improve upon those issues.