A twenty minute session at Access 2026 in Hamilton, on what an accessibility audit actually finds when it reaches a library’s web systems, and how to catch those failures yourself before the auditor does. Libraries run the catalogue, the digital collections, the institutional repository, and usually a WordPress site holding it together, and all of it is audited for real under AODA and the Accessible Canada Act.
Where and when
Event: Access 2026, October 14 to 16, 2026
Session: What an Accessibility Audit Actually Catches in Your Library’s Web Systems
Date & time: Wednesday, October 14, 2026 at 4:30 PM to 4:50 PM (tentative)
Format: Presentation, 20 minutes including questions
Room: 2035/2036, David Braley Health Sciences Centre
City: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Conference site: accessconference.ca
What the session covers
- The specific failures an audit catches in library web systems: generated markup that looks fine and tests broken, third party discovery layers and widgets that ship inaccessible, dynamic content that passes a manual review and fails a keyboard one, and the PDFs nobody tagged.
- How to test for them yourself: the keyboard pass, the screen reader pass, and which automated tooling genuinely helps as against the kind that lies to you.
- The one build practice that turns an accessibility audit from a fire into a formality.
No preamble about why accessibility matters. You work in libraries, you already know. This is the how, from someone who has sat on the wrong side of an audit and learned to build so it does not happen twice.