IT Accessibility Committee NYS Standards and The Forum Validation Tool

Why Accessibility is Important ● According to the 2000 Census:  49.7 million people in U. S. age 5 and older have disability – nearly one in five residents (19%)  5.2 million between ages of 5 and 20 (8% of people in age group)  30.6 million between 21 and 64 – 57% were employed  14.0 million 65 and older – 42% of this group had disabilities

What the statistics mean “Disability … contributes to lessened participation.” -Don Lollar, Centers for Disease Control “Technology can increase access to education, community and employment for people with disabilities.” - University of Washington Center for Technology and Disability Studies Inaccessible web sites lose up to 19% of potential audience

Background on NYS Standard Two de facto web accessibility standards: Two de facto web accessibility standards: W3C's WCAG W3C's WCAG U. S. Section 508 U. S. Section 508 First NYS Web Accessibility policy adopted in 1999 – aligned with the WCAG 1.0 First NYS Web Accessibility policy adopted in 1999 – aligned with the WCAG 1.0 Policy and hybrid (current) standard adopted in 2004 with biannual reviews Policy and hybrid (current) standard adopted in 2004 with biannual reviews

Policy Requirements All new content must conform to standard Timeframe to bring existing “high/medium traffic” content into conformance Procurement language Requirement to validate content before posting

Standard Requirements 14 individual standards, 81 checkpoints in all Hybrid of Federal Section 508 and W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Thorough compliance testing required up to 5 different tests on each page Full compliance requires “human judgment” (e.g., appropriateness of text included in alt attribute)

Compliance Number of products testing to NYS standard as of December 2007: 0 Cited by NYS web developers as significant obstacle to producing accessible web sites

Solution NYS Forum IT Accessibility Committee and Webmasters’ Guild identified requirements and drafted RFP for development of NYS-Specific tool Contract awarded to HiSoftware in October 2007 for desktop and online version of tool Testing of proposed products began in November 2007 Products accepted January 4, 2008

Why two versions? Desktop tool includes limited auto-repair capabilities, can be used behind firewall and to test intranets Online tool tests published content, no repair capabilities, cannot test unpublished content Desktop tool is customized version of off-the-shelf product Online tool developed specifically for NYS

Distribution NYS Forum has underwritten development and use of tools for first year: Each state agency gets 2 desktop license subscriptions free for one year Each state agency’s web developers and contractors that work with agency can access online tool free for one year

Implementation Online training for agency administrators and users of online tool Limited hands-on training for desktop users (max. one per agency) FAQ Will be developing other training and support resources as needs identified Many requests for presentations already

Demonstration of Tools

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