What do you do after you review the 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.
Our Process at PCC
- 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.
Equally Effective Access Plan
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