Accessibility

The reports Monsido has generated thus far have pointed to varied accessibility issues with Iona College Libraries LibGuides. Some of these issues are inherent to the Monsido platform, like the insistence that non-English words are potential misspellings. Some of these issues are a product of user error, like broken links or broken images, and can be resolved by regularly checking our guides for such problems.

Some issues are inherent to the SpringShare platform, however. A quick scan of this simple guide produced the following errors in Monsido:

META descriptions refer to the topline header on the guide - where I have "Monsido Test Page" written. Meta descriptions are the brief overviews of websites that appear in search engines. When search engines can't find the Meta description, they default to the initial text on the page.

Pages with No Index means that the code of the guide specifies that this guide not be indexed by search engine trawlers, occurring naturally when you set a guide to "Private" or "Internal."

These are largely issues with SEO, having more to do with digital marketing than accessibility issues. Monsido provides further explanation of each SEO issue on the PDF Cheatsheet: On-Page SEO. 

There are some accessibility issues inherent to LibGuides. LibGuides automatically use Headers 1 and 2 in the code: when you write content in LibGuides, you begin at Header 3. Header 5 is highly discouraged to comply with WCAG 2.1 at the AA Level, but it is also very useful when creating a sub-list in your work. Use sparingly if possible.

Some accessibility issues on the Monsido scan are caused by the Iona College website itself. Monsido has labelled the following text section as not contrasting significantly enough with the background:

This seems like a potential bug, as black and white are the most contrasted colors in the color spectrum.

For more information about Monsido scans, University of Maryland Baltimore County created a wiki describing common coding issues.