1.6 – After VPAT

By Karen Sorensen, PCC

NOTE: this page contains information that would not typically apply to faculty members at most institutions. The steps and recommendations below would usually be carried out by support personnel, accessibility professionals, and/or technical staff.

This page is provided for your information only. (Hint, no WAMOE exercise is associated with this information.)

VPAT Documentation

If there’s something you don’t understand in the VPAT and you are concerned about it, ask for clarification from the product rep or the contact on the VPAT, if one is provided.

Start keeping a collection of product VPATs and identify the accessibility concerns with each product. At PCC we use our Wiki to store VPATs, document our concerns and post accessibility testing results on a product.

Functional Accessibility Testing of the Product

Don’t trust everything you read

Verify accessibility claims with actual end user testing.

In addition to reviewing the VPAT and asking for clarification from the product team on areas that the VPAT says “Supports with Exceptions” or “Does not Support”, conduct your own usability tests (preferably with assistive technology users) to verify areas the VPAT claims the product “Supports” are actually usable by an experienced assistive technology (AT) end user. (See Section 1194.31 of the VPAT for the Section 508 Functional Performance Criteria accessibility standards.)

Our Process at PCC

Disability Services hired two graduate students who use screen readers extensively, to do screen reader testing with us. We can’t possibly do an in depth, definitive test on the accessibility of each product, but we try to test what a student in the course will need to access. We hope to hire a keyboard only tester but currently Supada, the Alt Media Specialist for Distance Education and I do the keyboard only testing, magnification tests and color contrast testing on 3rd party products used in online courses.
Here is what we at PCC use as our Accessibility Documentation template to document and record our findings. Feel free to use it and make it your own.
Here is a list of the testing tools we use:
  • For screen reader testing we start off testing with JAWS in Internet Explorer. If we run into a barrier we will try NVDA with Firefox and sometimes VoiceOver with Safari. If we still can’t access the content, we will mark it inaccessible unless the product’s company provides us with specific screen reader settings.
    • What about math content? How does a screen reader read math content? Oh, I knew one of you was going to ask about that! It’s really beyond the scope of this course, but read more about MathML, LaTeX and MathType from two faculty at PCC who studied math accessibility for a term. (By the way this study was such a hit, we have replicated Subject Area Accessibility Studies for other subject areas.)
  • Colour Contrast Analyzer from the Paciello Group for color contrast issues (The results are based on WCAG 2.0 AA settings)
  • Keyboard accessibility testing is done using the Tab, Space, Enter and Arrow keys and common Windows keyboard commands using Sticky Keys. I’ll also use Greg Kraus’s Web Evaluation Tools Bookmarklet to force show visual focus, making it easier to see where the focus is. (The tool can be used for a lot more than that too, so check it out!)
  • Magnification testing is done with Ctrl+ (Cmd+ on a Mac)  in the browser. Some browsers will show you a percentage of Zoom. Test usability at 200% which is the WCAG 2.0 standard.

So it’s Inaccessible. Now what?

Okay, so now you’ve reviewed the VPAT and completed functional testing and found the product to have accessibility barriers that cannot be accommodated. Now what? Well either the product shouldn’t be used or you have to provide students with disabilities an accessible alternative when they encounter a barrier. These accessible alternatives should be figured out well in advance of a student with a disability enrolling.

According to the FAQ sent to clarify questions posed after the Dear Colleague Letter sent June 2010 (see Seeking Clarity for more information about these,) “The planning should include identification of a means to provide immediate delivery of accessible devices or other technology necessary to ensure accessibility from the outset.” That may seem daunting, but we aren’t talking about replacing Disability Services. They will still be there for the unique needs of each student, but accessible alternatives to known barriers should be planned out in advance of an actual need.

Equally Effective Access Plan

Here’s the document we currently use at PCC: Equally Effective Access Plan. We transfer our functional testing results to this form and together the instructor, Disability Services, Distance Learning and hopefully the publishing representative work out the accessible alternatives necessary and begin the process of implementing the plan.
Now you know that in that course, there is a way for every student to succeed. Good job!

 

 

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Attribution to Portland Community College and D2L Corporation

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