Hi Stephanie,
You should watch Kate Lynch’s talk at the 2016 conference<https://youtu.be/Dd04w--7EuY?t=2h33m4s>. (All the slides are linked from the talk page<http://2016.code4lib.org/Growing-Accessibility-Advanced-Web-Accessibility-Coding-and-User-Testing-for-Libraries>.) It was packed with great info, but one key point was that self-guided testing should always be used in conjunction with the auditing tools. You should also check out her talk from this year<http://2017.code4lib.org/talks/Intentionally-Horrible-Markup-Strategies-for-Testing-and-Enhancing-Web-Accessibility-on-a-Larger-Scale>, which will help you create a framework for testing your sites and evaluating third-party software. Here it is on Youtube<https://youtu.be/oZTBNr_O5VM?t=59m53s>.

One great recommendation she gave is to unplug the mouse and turn on a screen reader. You can use VoiceOver<https://help.apple.com/voiceover/info/guide/10.12/#/> which is part of MacOS. You should be able to use all the key features through the keyboard alone, and if you can’t then it needs fixing.

Also, Kate Deibel gave a great talk on accessible search results pages<http://2017.code4lib.org/talks/The-Most-Accessible-Catalog-Results-Page-Ever> this past year, and you can watch that on youtube as well<https://youtu.be/oZTBNr_O5VM?t=1h25m36s>.

One thing to also look out for is that most library collections also have titles in non-english languages, and usually this language data is available to you. If you aren’t using the HTML5 “lang” attribute appropriately, a screen reader will sound like gobbledy-gook because it doesn’t know how to pronounce the words. (FYI - VoiceOver did not handle languages properly, although VoiceOver for Apps did… a bug report was submitted to Apple.)

Finally, make sure that users can get to the transcriptions, if available. It looks like you’re using a custom viewer? It seems that you can page through, but may not be able to get to the transcription text in the tabs. For what it’s worth, the IA Bookreader seems to have the best accessibility support among existing "out-of-the-box” viewers that I’ve tried.

Hope this helps,
Shaun

On Jul 18, 2017, at 3:15 PM, Stefanie Ramsay <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:

Hi all,

I'm looking into making our digital collections at Swarthmore more accessible for screen readers. We've used the WAVE tool to spot issues, but were curious what kinds of software or tests others are using to evaluate the accessibility of digital content?

Thanks,
Stefanie