Accessibility Analysis of Digital Libraries and Specialized Library Resources

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Accessibility Analysis of Digital Libraries and Specialized Library Resources

Objective

Keywords: digital library; digital library website; digital library for persons with disabilities; website accessibility; web accessibility; web accessibility for people with disabilities; web content accessibility guidelines; WCAG 2.1

Digitization is rapidly finding its way to all areas of the people's life, but still a lot of people do not have access to the most essential digital resources and are forced to fight for their use. Most particularly people with disabilities find themselves in the risk group and remain outside the digital society even in the countries with a high level of technology development and successful implementation of digital society strategies. Web accessibility for this category of users is the demand of times. In particular, it is becoming a priority to provide access to web content produced by libraries as they are institutions that produce, store and transmit information of social importance.

Libraries are working their way and adjusting to technological social development. Currently they are actively engaging in socio-communicative processes and are focusing on introduction of digital technologies and improvement of information, library and sociocommunication technologies. The library's contribution to society with reference to people with disabilities is in performing the following functions: informational, cultural, educational, socializing and inclusive including but not limited to performing them in the digital environment. However, the standards of library's web content accessibility in different countries still do not meet the needs of users with disabilities and it makes it more difficult for libraries to perform the above mentioned functions. It happens due to the lack of attention to this question in the library field at the institutional level and it is complicated by the dynamics of technological development.

This article sheds light on the current state of accessibility of both digital libraries, as they are universal resources for a wide number of users, and specialized library websites for people with disabilities and their compliance with the WCAG 2.1 standard.

The aim of the article is to examine the state of accessibility and the implementation level of different types of digital libraries and specialized library resources websites' content for people with disabilities.

Literature review

An analysis of recent studies and publications shows that the question of web content accessibility is addressed from different angles. Groups of authors develop a methodology for selecting general criteria for adapting websites for people with disabilities (Horoshevskij & Matyunina, 2017); determine the structure of information materials, summarize the design of resources and the range of digital library services potentially needed by people with disabilities during social and educational inclusion (Devi & Verma, 2017; Xie et al., 2021; Spina & Cohen, 2018), analyze the national libraries' websites accessibility (Marina & Marin, 2019) and websites of research libraries and state institutions of different countries and their compliance with WCAG

2.0 standard (Pasichnyk et al., 2019); outline the possibilities of using digital library projects by different categories of users with disabilities (Xie et al., 2019), etc.

Since the introduction of the first (1999) and second editions (2008), Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) have become the main international standard for website accessibility, which has been seen as a “globally recognized and technology-neutral set of web content accessibility guides” (“Information and Communication Technology (ICT)”, 2017). WCAG has been included into the legislative framework in Australia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and in France, Germany and the Republic of Korea it has been adapted to it. However, despite the broad introduction of WCAG 1.0 and WCAG

2.0 (WCAG 2.0, 2018), the content that complied with the guidelines was not always fully accessible by all categories of users with disabilities.

Considering the overall situation with web accessibility, the libraries' web content has not become generally available for people with disabilities during WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 functioning and in most countries its adaptation for the above mentioned user category has not become a priority among the other areas of institutional policy of library and information science field. However, many libraries have referred to the WCAG 2.0 criteria to set their own accessibility standards. In the United States, for example, the survey of members of the Association of Research Libraries showed that 67% of respondents used WCAG 2.0 AA as a criterion for web accessibility testing, and 12% of them went on to use AAA compliance as an accessibility criterion. The survey also showed that only 33% of respondents included the factor of accessibility in their policy for the development of digital collections (Spina & Cohen, 2018). In most countries, ignoring the optimization of libraries' web content to the needs of socially vulnerable users has led to its de facto absence. Even the accessibility of national resources has become challenging. This was confirmed by the results of a study of 151 national libraries websites of different countries in 2019. Specifically 29 of them (19%) fully complied, 3 - partially complied, 119 - did not comply with the WCAG 2.0 recommendations at the A, AA and AAA levels (Marina & Marin, 2019).

WCAG 2.1 is the third updated version of the standard that was released on June 5, 2018. This version was initiated to improve accessibility guidelines for three main groups of users: users with cognitive difficulties; low vision users; users with disabilities who prefer to use mobile devices and tablets. WCAG 2.1 introduced 17 additional success criteria to increase the usability of web content based on language recognition software; optimization of motion and gestures; simplification of content use without display orientation restrictions; visual presentation of nontext components; animation settings; facilitating the ways of inputting information; streamlining of gesture optimization, etc. (W3C, 2018). Given that the adaptation of library resources to WCAG

2.0 has not been completed, the compliance with the new WCAG 2.1 criteria has become a challenge to them.

On January 21, 2021 the first public working draft of WCAG 3.0 was presented, which provides a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible to users with disabilities These guidelines address accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile devices, wearable devices, and other web of things devices. They address various types of web content including static content, interactive content, visual and auditory media, as well as virtual and augmented reality, a variety of web tools such as browsers and assistive technologies. The presented new accessibility guidelines fit into the existing structure of WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1, but also qualitatively extend the previous versions. With the implementation of WCAG 3.0 the inability to test resources automatically will be a challenge.

Methods

Within the framework of the current study the quantitative analysis of the collected data has been done by applying the descriptive research methodology. The Webaccessibility.com service has been chosen as the library web content accessibility data source. Having used the above mentioned service, 56 library websites have been tested and their compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 standard has been determined. Additionally, the comparative analysis of the websites traffic ranking has been conducted. Alexa.com has been chosen as the global traffic ranking data source. The process of data accumulation was done on January, 2022.

Results and Discussion

In order to determine the web accessibility of library web content, the webometric analysis of 56 library websites and the comparative analysis of their Global Rank have been conducted at the first stage of the current study. Alexa.com has been used for this purpose. The first group of the resources that have been studied consists of digital libraries of different types and scale of implementation (Table 1). The second group includes specialized library resources focused on serving different categories of users with disabilities (Table 2): digital libraries, websites of specialized libraries of national, state and regional levels.

WCAG 2.1 Compliance Score of Digital Libraries' Web Content