ByWater Solutions Announces Accessibility Compliance for Koha and Aspen

by Jessie Zairo on Feb 4, 2025

ByWater Solutions, America's forefront provider of open source library systems, is proud to announce that the Koha Open Source ILS, Aspen Discovery System, and Aspen LiDA App now comply with current industry accessibility standards. Because of the efforts within these open source communities, Koha now conforms to WCAG 2.1 Accessibility Requirement, and Aspen Discovery and LiDA conform to the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. These projects were completed as part of joint efforts between the vendors and users of these products and ensure that end users can benefit from all these solutions have to offer regardless of disability.

Koha

Koha currently complies with WCAG 2.1 AA requirements listed here: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/ . The community continually strives to comply with WCAG 2.2 AA requirements as soon as possible: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/. WCAG 2.2 AA includes all of the requirements from WCAG 2.1 AA plus more guidelines to make Koha more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these.

Koha is compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act and meets website accessibility to the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. Koha has a JavaScript dialect compliant with ECMAScript 262 edition 5.1. It is compliant with PECR 2011 and the ICO's requirement regarding cookies. It uses CSS 1/2 Style Sheets in preference to HTML formatting.

Koha is compliant with the new public sector requirements which came in on 23rd September 2020 (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/make-your-website-or-app-accessible-and-publish-an-accessibility-statement) which require public-facing applications to be accessible to level WCAG 2.1 AA standard. The Open Source Koha community QA process also includes accessibility as a pass/fail test when adding new code to the software.

Koha supports keyboard-only navigation. Font size, text, and background colors can be changed.

The Koha open source community has a role in the development team of Web Accessibility Advocate. This role is currently held by Matt Blenkinsop, a Software Developer, at PTFS Europe, the UK's main Koha vendor.

Aspen Discovery and Aspen LiDA

Aspen Discovery and Aspen LiDA's goal is to comply with level 2.1 AA standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). While accessibility guidelines are meant to ensure equal access to online content, these standards actually benefit all users regardless of ability. Here are a few ways Aspen Discovery has included accessibility in its design and features, along with some things to consider when trying to make your catalog more accessible to users.

• Aspen Discovery is currently compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA.
• Aspen has accessibility baked into much of its code, meaning with the default settings users are simply unable to make choices that could impact accessibility.
• Aspen uses ARIA attribute tags in its HTML code. ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, and the tags are used to help bridge the gap between standard HTML and browsers, AT (Assistive Technology – screen readers, magnifiers, text-to-speech, etc), JavaScript toolkits, and other applications.
  
• Aspen Discovery is releasing new features on a regular basis, and should a feature be found not to comply, Aspen Discovery will consider a fix to be a critical issue to resolve.
• Since the majority of Aspen’s interface colors are customizable in these settings, we have included a Contrast Ratio column that serves as a tool to ensure high-contrast combinations for background colors and text. The higher the number in this column, the higher the contrast, and the more readable the text will be. If you select a low-contrast combination – for example, black text on a dark blue background – the contrast ratio will show a low number. If you try to save the theme settings with these color selections, Aspen will display an error message and will revert back to the previous color selections, so it’s not even possible to create an inaccessible color scheme by accident! Libraries can control the minimum contrast level allowed in Layout settings.The default minimum ratio is 4.5.
• Wherever staff can upload images into Aspen, we try to provide places to enter in alt-text. Alt text is the text that appears instead of the image if the image fails to load on a user’s screen, but this is also used by screen-reading tools to describe images to users.
• Another way Aspen strives to achieve greater accessibility is through keyboard navigation. This allows users to hit the Tab key to move through interactive elements of the interface in a logical order, typically from left to right and top to bottom. To test this out, try hitting the Tab key on any page within Aspen to see the tab order. Once an element is selected, usually hitting the Enter key is the equivalent of a mouse click.

For More Information

Elise Aiello
Partner Engagement Specialist
ByWater Solutions
bywatersolutions.com
Phone:(888)900-8944