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The purpose of this paper is to explain the changes in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 compared with WCAG 1.0 within the context of its historical development.

In order to compare WCAG 2.0 with WCAG 1.0 a diachronic analysis of the evolution of these standards is done. Known authors and publications in the field, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) web pages, WebAIM and the blogosphere were also monitored for comments and third‐party analyses. The analysis of the main changes from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0 was based on personal experience with WAI guidelines, experimentation with some of the new guidelines, and a selection of best practice online services in the application of the WCAG, including WAI documentation.

WCAG 2.0 is more educational and is applied to more technologies than WCAG 1.0. The limitations of WCAG 1.0 are mostly due to its origin. In changing from one to the other, new priorities and new elements must be taken into account. The paper concludes that though these guidelines are a useful tool for governments, they are only the first step towards accessibility, which can only be achieved through user‐centred design.

This paper explains the significance and limitations of the WCAG and gives a short guide to adapting web sites to the new regulations.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how Edith Cowan University (ECU) Library improved the accessibility of their web site, aiming for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0 Level AA. It describes the results obtained.

Initial testing by consultants was conducted in October 2012. The web site was defined as all webpages which appear part of the library web site, including supplier webpages, plus pages from the university web site and library web site. Library staff applied the recommendations to pages which they could edit, and discussed the recommendations with suppliers to improve their product ' s accessibility. The web site was re-tested in June 2013.

ECU Library web site failed WCAG 2.0 Level A standard in the initial testing and re-testing. Many individual pages which failed initially passed the re-test. The smallest improvement was seen in suppliers’ web sites.

This paper could help libraries to improve web site accessibility, as it covers negotiating with suppliers to upgrade their web sites, plus upgrading editable webpages. It shows initial and re-test results, allowing libraries to compare their results to those of ECU. Legislation and guidelines state web sites should be accessible to all users and organisations providing non-accessible web sites risk being sued.

A web site not complying with WCAG version 2.0 would be very difficult for people with disabilities to access. Upgrading ECU Library ' s web site will provide all users with more equal access to the resources.

This study describes problems in upgrading academic library webpages and related supplier web sites and organisation web site to improve accessibility for people with disabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and identify the status of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) conformance levels (A, AA, AAA) and accessibility status in terms of Severity (Error, Warning and Review) and Responsibility (Editor, Webmaster and Developer) of Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) Library websites based on Siteimprove Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform.

The library websites of IITs were tested using Siteimprove web-tool to gather details pertaining to W3C's WCAG 2.1 standards. The data thus obtained were then visualized using spreadsheet software for greater insight. A partial correlation test was also done to assess the relationship between the three conformance levels.

The study could identify significant accessibility-related limitations of the IIT library websites concerning the three WCAG 2.1 conformance levels A (max IIT Bombay), AA (max IIT Dhanbad (ISM)) and AAA (max IIT Gandhinagar and IIT Varanasi (BHU)), Severity and Responsibility. A positive linear relationship exists amongst these conformance levels. The mean value of conformance levels were found to be 18.3 (A), 2.2 (AA) and 3.1 (AAA); Severity scores were found to be 14.4 (Error), 3.9 (Warning) and 5.2 (Review); and Responsibility scores were found to be 6 (Editor), 9.3 (Webmaster) and 8.3 (Developer), respectively.

The study highlights the comparative picture of accessibility issues and conformance levels of the IITs' library website homepage with the help of results derived/based on Siteimprove Accessibility Checker. The findings of the study reveal that though the library website of IITs' in India possess a well-designed and easily navigable website homepage as far as their accessibility for VIPs is concerned, there are several issues that are still to be resolved.

World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) Marrakesh VIP Treaty (MVT) and the W3C's WCAG cater to the requirements and rights of the persons with vision-related disability of accessing information and knowledge building a steeper and deeper knowledge divide. Identifying and rectifying the shortcomings in the library websites will bridge the accessibility-divide and make the society more inclusive.

No previous study could be identified evaluating the accessibility issues of the library website of Indian IITs focussed on vision-disabled persons using Siteimprove. The methodology and approach of this paper have value in terms of reusability and reproducibility facilitating future studies.

Digital inclusivity is about making web sites available to users regardless of a user’s device or disability. This study seeks to find out how accessible and mobile ready state library web sites are and if there is a relationship between web site accessibility and mobile readiness.

I examined web site accessibility through automated code evaluation and manual code inspection of the web site homepage. I evaluated mobile readiness by comparing how homepages displayed on a desktop computer vs. a smart phone.

Most state library web sites had accessibility problems, including missing alternative text for images (82%), inaccessible forms (54%), and poor contrast between text and background (56%). Only 36% of the sites were mobile ready. A Spearman rho analysis of accessibility and mobile readiness found that the more accessible a site is, the more likely it is mobile ready (and vice versa).

While this study identified accessibility and mobile readiness issues, it does not address why these problems exist. In addition, the unit of analysis was limited to the web site homepage. The study’s results emphasize the need to combine manual code inspection with automated analysis, particularly for images’ alternative text.

The study suggests that state libraries need to take greater care in meeting accessibility standards, particularly easily followed standards such as providing appropriate alternative text for images.

Despite the importance of state libraries in organizing and funding local libraries, there has been little research to date on state library web sites.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which accessibility is taken into account in the assessment and ranking of e-government web sites through the lens of a specific study related to Dubai e-government.

The paper considers a case study related to Dubai e-government and it evaluates the accessibility of each of the 21 Dubai e-government web sites, based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and using an automated accessibility testing tool. A bivariate correlation analysis is performed to assess the correlation between web site ranking and accessibility score.

The research reveals that contrary to common intuition and some earlier studies, there is a weak correlation between e-government web site ranking score and web site accessibility.

The paper uses an accessibility metric that is a proxy indicator of web accessibility and is not a real assessment of accessibility as experienced by a person with disability.

When re-examined through the lens of Rawls's moral theory, this research suggests that accessibility should be given a higher priority in the general evaluation and ranking of e-government web sites.

The paper promotes universal accessibility to e-government information and services.

The paper uses ethical arguments to highlight the need to comprehensively consider accessibility as a major criterion in the assessment and ranking of e-government web sites.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the US states and territories’ official tourism information websites based on the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) and Section 508 guidelines to identify the compliance of websites towards disabilities policies and their behaviour pattern.

The official tourism websites of 57 states and territories were analysed through the TAW tool for WCAG 2.0 and AChecker for Section 508. Cluster analysis was used to produce a group of websites underlying the accessibility issues obtained from the online tool to understand the common pattern of behaviour.

The result revealed that websites have serious and significant accessibility issues underlying the prescribed guidelines that would interfere with the use of the website by disabled people. The main issues that make the website least accessible focussed on the following guideline of WCAG 2.0: compatible, navigable, text alternative, distinguishable and adaptable.

The empirical results provide the US states and territories’ tourism authority to better understand web accessibility in their websites and its impact on disabled people.

As the web plays an important role in individual lives, this study highlights the accessibility issues which need immediately focussed and technically planned actions from the respective states and territories to ensure that designed web content should communicate effectively and universally.

This paper presents an exploratory study on the accessibility of Spanish World Heritage website home pages in the Spanish language.

The study sample comprised 78 home pages from the institutional websites of the 47 cultural, natural and mixed assets considered as World Cultural Heritage by The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco). These home pages have been analysed using online accessibility validator tools, following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 recommendation for the different levels of priority. The compiled data were employed in a quantitative study on adherence to WCAG guidelines. Furthermore, the types of errors made using the perspective of accessibility and usability were identified, and the application rate was calculated for these accessibility guidelines according to the type of entity managed by the websites and pages.

The results show that more than 25 percent of the cases analysed had ten accessibility errors or fewer. Moreover, it was only necessary to correct one or two types of errors in close to 40 percent of them. The paper draws the conclusion that, despite technological and legislative advances that make public entity websites accessible, there is still much to do before complete web accessibility and usability at AA and AAA level can be achieved.

Identifying accessibility problems on institutional websites constitutes the first step towards creating web content that is easy to access and manage for users with disabilities. In this regard, this study contributes to improving web content according to objective guidelines such as those encouraged by the WCAG 2.0.

This article provides information on how accessibility and usability guidelines are implemented by institutional websites for Cultural Heritage deemed especially important. This is an issue with significant implications for users and for which, however, there is a lack of prior studies. As a result, the value and originality of this paper can be considered evident.

Web accessibility is the practice of making web sites accessible to people, such as the disabled, who are using more than just traditional web browsers to access the internet. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to overview web accessibility and to highlight the ethics of web accessibility from a managerial perspective.

To that end, this paper reviews related literature, highlights relevant public policy, discusses web accessibility from a systems development perspective, and concludes with a discussion of web accessibility with respect to different ethical theories.

The findings take the form of a tutorial that highlights how to address web accessibility projects. The findings also examine web accessibility projects as they relate to well‐known ethical theories. Additionally, the findings also incorporate ethical opinions from web designers who have completed web accessibility projects in the past.

The paper makes several contributions to the existing literatures on web accessibility and ethics. An important contribution is that the paper is the first tutorial on web accessibility that also examines the topic through the lens of ethical theories. In addition to the tutorial, the paper reports on the opinions of web designers who have worked on web accessibility projects in the past.

This study aims to examine Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Open Journal Systems (OJS) for its overall web accessibility and compliance with the Federal Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility and Compliance Act, also known as Section 508.

Twenty-one individual web pages in the CSUN test instance of PKP’s OJS version 2.4.0 used in three back-end journal development user roles were examined using three web-accessibility tools (WAVE, Fangs, Functional Accessibility Evaluator). Errors in accessibility were then logged and mapped to specific Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) criteria.

In all, 202 accessibility errors were reported across the 21 OJS pages selected for testing. Because of this, the OJS cannot be efficiently utilized by assistive technologies and therefore does not pass the minimal level of acceptability as described in the WCAG 2.0. However, the authors found that the types of errors reported in this study could be simply and effectively remedied.

Further studies will need to corroborate, on a larger scale, the problems of accessibility found in the specific pages. Only three user roles were examined; other roles will need to be analyzed for their own problems with accessibility. Finally, although specific errors were noted, most can be easily fixed.

There is an important need for accessible software design. In the case of CSUN, one of the campus partners will be better served by improving the web accessibility of the authors’ online open access journals.

Although many studies and analyses of Section 508 compliance of front-facing web resources have been conducted, very few appear to address the back-end of such tools. This is the first to examine what problems in accessibility journal users with disabilities might encounter as OJS system administrators, journal managers or journal editors.

The purpose of this paper is to present longitudinal data on the accessibility of 56 North American academic library web sites, as well as insights into the connection between accessibility and certain design methods and technologies.

Bobby 3.1.1 was used to evaluate compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. Also studied were the main method of page layout (CSS versus HTML tables), whether a content management system was used, and whether skip‐navigation links were employed.

The percentage of Bobby‐approved pages has remained consistent around 60 per cent in 2010 and 2012. However, the percentage of errors per page, a metric more sensitive to the pervasiveness of accessibility barriers, has steadily and significantly decreased. Sites whose layouts are built with cascading style sheets have fewer errors per page than those that use tables for layout. Sites that use a CMS have considerably higher percentages of approved pages and fewer errors per page than sites that are not built with a CMS.

The principal tool used, Bobby 3.1.1, is capable of detecting only a subset of accessible design principles. Future studies should examine compliance with the newer WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

The use of a content management system may have a positive impact on accessibility. While this study reveals some promising trends, more education and continued advocacy is needed to increase web accessibility at libraries.

This is the only study that provides up‐to‐date trend information about the accessibility of a broader set of academic library web sites (a set not limited to one state) over an extended time period. It is also the only accessibility study comparing academic library web sites that use a content management system to those that do not.