Web accessibility trends in university libraries and library schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Only properly designed web sites are accessible to people with print disabilities. The purpose of this paper is to follow up on earlier investigations of this kind by looking at the web sites of all 56 ALA‐accredited library schools, and of the libraries on these campuses. Design/methodology/approach Bobby 3.1.1 was used to evaluate compliance with major accessible web design guidelines. In addition, key web pages were checked manually for the presence of skip‐navigation components, and the sites' re‐design status was ascertained. The results were presented in the form of basic descriptive statistics, including percentages of Bobby‐approved pages and the average number of barriers per page. Correlations of the current accessibility data with older data sets and with library school ratings were also calculated. Findings The results indicate that despite an increase in accessibility, only 50 to 60 per cent of the web sites were free of Bobby‐detectable errors. Canadian sites were more accessible than US sites. Contrary to previous findings, recently redesigned sites tended to be more accessible. Highly ranked sites also tended to have higher accessibility scores. US sites showed a random‐like up‐and‐down movement in accessibility status between 2002 and 2006. Research limitations/implications The collected data reflect compliance with only a subset of accessible design principles. Practical implications More education and continued advocacy is needed to increase web accessibility at libraries and library schools and to help establish library schools as models of program accessibility. Originality/value This is the only study that provides trend information about the accessibility of a broader set of library and library school web sites.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".