Access Now!

The components of the Access Now project are: 1) academic librarians working with public library librarians, 2) working with students and desiigners from the community, 3) developing a simple, flexible, and easy to edit template, and 4) meeting all the laws, guidelines, and standards regarding web accessibility.

The Librarians

For a list of librarians working on the projects see the Other Personnel page on this site. For the public libraries involved, see the Public Libraries page on this site.

The Designers

For a list of librarians working on the projects see the Designers page on this site.

The Guidelines

• The template is made with valid XHTML 1.1. At some point, if the project continues, the template may be converted to HTML 5.
• The pages conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. That could be changed to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 if a simple mechanism to measure basic compliance is developed.
• Structural and semantic mark up has been used. So far, because structural markup is clean and simple, this has been done with text editors. If a content management system that accommodates valid code and structural markup is freely available and easy to use, that system could be adopted.
• The pages conform to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. While Section 508 only explicitly applies to United States governmental websites, the Section 508 guidelines are used to test compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. The Kentucky Revised Statutes, 61.980-61.988, applies the Section 508 to state-funded agencies. This is important since the United States Department of Justice's Project Civic Access enforces the Section 508 guidelines for public libraries.