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The use of web accessibility evaluation tools is a widespread practice. Evaluation tools are heavily employed as they help in reducing the burden of identifying accessibility barriers. However, an over-reliance on automated tests often leads to setting aside further testing that entails expert evaluation and user tests. In this paper we empirically show the capabilities of current automated evaluation tools. To do so, we investigate the effectiveness of 6 state-of-the-art tools by analysing their coverage, completeness and correctness with regard to WCAG 2.0 conformance. We corroborate that relying on automated tests alone has negative effects and can have undesirable consequences. Coverage is very narrow as, at most, 50% of the success criteria are covered. Similarly, completeness ranges between 14% and 38%; however, some of the tools that exhibit higher completeness scores produce lower correctness scores (66-71%) due to the fact that catching as many violations as possible can lead to an increase in false positives. Therefore, relying on just automated tests entails that 1 of 2 success criteria will not even be analysed and among those analysed, only 4 out of 10 will be caught at the further risk of generating false positives. Copyright 2013 ACM.

Website accessibility is a very real and pressing issue for public libraries internationally. Tim Berners-Lee credited with founding the Web, states "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." (Henry & McGee, 2010). There is wide-spread support for adherence to the Web Content Advisory Guidelines Version 1.0 and 2.0 (WCAG) throughout Federal, State and Local levels of government in Australia. The Guidelines have also been affirmed by the Australian Human Rights Commission, disability advocacy groups such as Vision Australia, and the Australian Library and Information Association. The Australian Government issued a press release in February 2010 which mandates conformance with WCAG 2.0 by 2015 for all government sites. In order to accommodate this, a new transition strategy has been provided by the Australian Government. While adherence to the Guidelines is clearly mandated, the level of adherence within the public libraries in Western Australia has not been tested until now. Public libraries, by their very nature, should be providing an equality of access to their collections and services. This research assesses the level of adherence to the Web Content Advisory Guidelines (Version 1.0 and 2.0) of public libraries within Western Australia. Through on-line website accessibility evaluation tools, manual checklists, surveys and interviews, this research identifies the level of compliance to these Guidelines as well as the implementation barriers and level of understanding within Western Australia. The assessment of the website accessibility of public libraries in Western Australia operated as a case study methodology incorporating both quantitative and qualitative assessment tools. An analysis of the research methods and findings is provided in this dissertation. The findings of the research demonstrate that at present no public library website in Western Australia with an on-line catalogue link, ot