Moving Large Organizations Towards Accessibility and Standards - Access U

Looking at accessibility and web standards as part of QA

Sometimes it’s simply a matter of inconsistency: some pages in a web app may be marked up appropriately, but not in others.

Concepts

Accessibility: “allowing people with disabilities to access the same information and perform the same functions using the same electronic information resources as people without disabilities”
There is a reluctance to want to do this because there is a sense it is geared only to a select few. But there is a better case for ROI if we look at it from a QA standpoint.

Web Standards: “designing and building web sites and applications to w3C specifications for language and markup”.
Benefits include lowering costs of production, working on different platforms, etc.

Universal Access: “available to everyone, on all platforms, all the time” (pie in the sky goal)

Quality Assurance: Ensuring something will perform satisfactorily in service. Includes quality control.

Environment

In large organizations, web resources are pervasive, decentralized, diverse and huge.

  • Public presence: marketing, sales, corporate image/branding, public relations, investor relations, legal
  • Internal presence: information sharing/management, internal communications, employee development/relations, team building, business tools
  • Content sources: web developers, authors
  • Content managers: information resources (IR/IT), webmasters, department managers, PR, contractors
  • Content diversity: static pages, dynamic pages, web apps, Flash/audio/MM, PDF
  • Technological diversity: CMS, WYSIWYG, AJAX, Server and DB technologies
  • Other concerns: security, resource management, productivity/efficiency, customer satisfaction, cost control

8 Steps To Bring Accessibility Into An Organization

Needs to be part of an overall quality control issue. Cannot be introduced in isolation.

Preparation: Gather Baseline Information

What do we know? What resources do we have? What state is it in?
What do we know? Held survey of knowledge across the organization. Realized training was essential.
What resources do we have? Content inventory, are there islands, who owns what.
What state is it in Top level testing - start at home page, every link directly off that (Glenda Sims). Automated testing tools (webxm), paid consultants
“I dont think it is feasible to use paid consultants for an ongoing basis for a large organization. but if you bring someone in you can learn from, that’s a good place to start”.

Gain Top Level Support

When you are looking to implement changes at this level, you need to get support. There is an erroneous belief that once you come up with a policy for accessibility, it exposes you to new risk as you have something to be measured against.

Management Motivation:

  • Risk Management: ADA Concerns, Section 508/504, state law. (there are no real standards for ADA, but employers do need to provide for employees)
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Business development
  • Productivity
  • Cost of maintenance
  • Resource optimization

Membership

  • Include stakeholders from all affected areas of our organization
  • Charter with timelines and deliverables
  • Reports to decision making authority — doesn’t matter what they do if they don’t have authority
  • Include technical/cultural evangelists

Define Standards

Some talk of how we measure usability, I mentioned SUMI

Prioritize

Compliant (immediately, no excuses): All new or revised pages, top 10% visited pages, critical pages
Compliant by (date): legacy resources (encourages archive of old/outdated pages)

Provide training and technical support

  • Committing to a major culture change, need to provide support so that parties can be successful
  • Need to develop in-house expertise (evangelists)
  • In-house experts need to be proactive in offering assistance
  • Offer a solution at the time that the problem is reported
  • Use baseline assessment data to decide what training is needed.
  • Provide awareness training to as wide an audience as possible
  • Develop in-house training capabilities

They even introduce some level of accessibility training into new employee training

Monitor conformance

  • Automated reviews
  • Auditing
    • sample based manual auditing of items that cannot be evaluated automatically
    • compliance auditing should be independent of content ownership
    • audit failures should have clear resolution path,
    • management review of audit results

Remain Flexible through the Changes

Issues: competing priorities, limited resources, rapidly shifting environment, encourage creativity

I aksed about the surveys they did: it was a suite of surveys based on how people answered the first iltered through. Initially got everyone with DW.. people doing the work.