Skip to Main Content

Accessibility Best Practices for LibGuide Content Creators

Accessibility Best Practices for LibGuides

Why create accessible LibGuides? | The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines | LibGuides and WCAG | Resources

“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”

– Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

This guide attempts to provide tips, examples, and best practices for accessibility issues related to LibGuides. This guide is NOT meant to serve as an example for how a guide should be designed. For instance, there are too many navigational tabs and each page is text-heavy.

For a concise checklist of accessibility concerns, please review the LibGuide Accessibility Quick Guide.

The purpose of this LibGuide is to help content creators create guides that are functional to ALL users.

We will use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to highlight specific areas and tools available in the LibGuide editor. While the WCAG is a seemingly overwhelming list of standards, this guide will break down the most commonly misused LibGuide options into manageable and usable practices.

Let's begin by discussing why creating an accessible LibGuide matters. Then we will define the WCAG, its four principles, and the success criteria.

Why create accessible LibGuides?

Creating accessible guides benefits everyone.

Universal design benefits everyone. This includes users with a disability, users with a temporary impairment (such as a broken arm), users with a situational impairment (such as slow internet connection), and users with environmental impairments (such as a user in a library without headphones).

Excerpt from The Centre for Excellence in Universal Design: What is Universal Design?

Universal Design is the design and composition of an environment so that it can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people regardless of their age, size, ability or disability. An environment (or any building, product, or service in that environment) should be designed to meet the needs of all people who wish to use it. This is not a special requirement, for the benefit of only a minority of the population. It is a fundamental condition of good design. If an environment is accessible, usable, convenient and a pleasure to use, everyone benefits. By considering the diverse needs and abilities of all throughout the design process, universal design creates products, services and environments that meet peoples' needs. Simply put, universal design is good design.

It makes your LibGuide easier to find and use.

From using friendly URLs to creating page outlines using properly nested headings, a guide that has been created with accessibility in mind is a guide that is easier to use, easier to search, and easier to navigate - for everyone.

It's the right thing to do - ethically and legally.

As an institution that receives federal funds, we are required to provide electronic resources that are accessible to all users. National and international accessibility standards exist to guide the understanding of accessibility for electronic resources. Very generally summarizing, the guidelines help insure that content is easily read with screen reader technology, platforms are easily navigated by keyboard, and media content includes captions.

University of Tennessee System Policy IT0126 — Accessibility

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were developed through the W3C process in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world, with a goal of providing a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally.

WCAG are stable, referenceable technical standards. Each standard has 12-13 guidelines that are organized under 4 principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. For each guideline, there are testable success criteria, which are at three levels: A, AA, and AAA. [1]

The four principles

  • Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
  • Operable - User interface components and navigation must be operable.
  • Understandable - Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable.
  • Robust - Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

The testable success criteria

  • Level A - For Level A conformance (the minimum level of conformance), the Web page satisfies all the Level A Success Criteria, or a conforming alternate version is provided.
  • Level AA - For Level AA conformance, the Web page satisfies all the Level A and Level AA Success Criteria, or a Level AA conforming alternate version is provided.
  • Level AAA - For Level AAA conformance, the Web page satisfies all the Level A, Level AA and Level AAA Success Criteria, or a Level AAA conforming alternate version is provided.
    • ***It is not recommended that Level AAA conformance be required as a general policy for entire sites because it is not possible to satisfy all Level AAA Success Criteria for some content.***
This guide does not attempt to cover all of the guidelines for each principle. Nor does it attempt to highlight each level of success for each guideline. It is merely a list of tips, examples, and best practices specific to using LibGuides.

LibGuides and WCAG

This guide will focus on the most common WGAC errors that have been identified throughout LibGuides. Because of this, we will primarily be looking at the principles Perceivable and Operable; however, several issues fall into multiple categories, so Understandable and Robust will still be referenced.

Also, the success criteria will be occasionally noted, but it is more important to understand that any instance of Level A or AA non-conformance is considered an accessibility issue.