Library Accessibility Guide: Individuals with Disabilities

Web Accessibility in Mind (Web AIM) is a non-for profit organization that began in 1999 with a mission to increase awareness of web accessibility. Web AIM.org has created numerous tools such as WAVE, a web accessibility evaluation tool, the Color Contrast Checker, and manual checklists for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), updated to 2.1 in June 2018, by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)e.

• WebAIM's Introduction to Web Accessibility is a great resource for understanding how people with disabilities use the web, the frustrations they feel when they cannot access the web, and what you can do to make your sites more accessible.

Since the CSI library's virtual presence online is as essential as it's physical spaces, self-created online library resources and websites need to be checked for web accessibility by individuals with disabilities.Federal law considers websites freely available online as 'public' spaces that must be accessible to people who have disabilities. Just how 'compliant' websites need to be is in question, even for private businesses under Title III of the ADA law. Government websites were slated to comply with WCAG 2.1 AA standards at minimum in January 2018, but the DOJ withdrew it's the set of guidelines that provide the basis for online accessibility rules for most other nations around the world. Level AA is considered the targeted standard for most commercial websites.