New ADA Requirements - WAM and WebPac

Sierra, Millennium & Encore
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[Cross posted to Sierra listserv]
Newly issued federal rules require public K-12, higher education, state, and local government institutions to make sure their web content (including mobile apps and social media posts) is accessible to those with vision, hearing, cognitive and manual dexterity disabilities. The requirement doesn’t go into effect until April 24, 2026, but we’re already compiling lists of web pages/content to quadruple check.

Are any of you tackling this yet?
I’m not worried about WebPac proper because we have the BiblioCommons discovery layer, but I am worried about WAM, the credit card payment interface, and account preference stuff that’s only available from us in WebPac - My Account.

If you’ve already improved the WebPac code, I would love to peek at what you’ve done to make it more accessible. We’re using the Palo Alto responsive code they put out on Github a number of years ago. I was also going to check back with them on potential updates.

A summary article about this is found here:

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Do you mind elaborating on your WAM concerns, @lisamotschke?  What sort of issues do you foresee with WAM which wouldn’t be the responsibility of Innovative or the content providers to resolve?  Thanks in advance!

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Just seeing this now, apologies for the delay. I don’t have any specific concerns with WAM as a tool, but I am concerned with the accessibility of the page itself and whether WebPac overall will meet the requirements.

WebPac might be the responsibility of III to update to meet standards, but it’s our responsibility to request those changes and potentially remove access if they don’t meet the guidelines by the April 2026 deadline. Ultimately the library is liable if we do not meet the standard.