Defining Your Accessibility Standard

The Inclusion Baseline

• Define the standards and conformance guidelines for digital communications.
  W3C: WCAG-AA standard is the globally accepted best practice
  UsableNet: 5 Steps to Creating an Accessibility Clause For Vendor Contracts, Jason Taylor, October 2019
• Define Accessibility law requirements for which digital communications must comply. This is generally governed by legislation through various level of government; Such as
  The Ontario AODA standards, and
  The U.S. Section508 standards.
• Define evaluation tasks. This can be performed by automated evaluation tools for functional testing, and end-user focus groups for usability testing.
• Define a baseline of web technologies. The goal is to make digital communications accessible to as many people as possible, but by defining a baseline of user agents (browsers, screen readers, media players, Etc), and system platforms (Windows, iOS, Android, mobile devices, Etc), will identify the scope of expectations.
• Define testing methodology. The evaluation results will depend upon the tools used, level of expertese, and user involvement.
• Define test procedures. Testing digital communications across hardware devices, software applications, levels of user experience, and developer expertese, will require standard Persona scripts, assessing specific web pages, and assessing specific dynamic functions.
• Define the report style. Generating an accessibility evaluation report can be challenging and difficult for others to understand. Depending upon the report audience, consider documents and videos that comply with accessibility standards, with remediation recommendations.
  Programmer-focused website accessibility evaluations: Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
• Define the delivery process. To meet expectations the accessibility evaluation results must be delivered in a format and in a way it can be understood and acted upon. Consider Executive summaries, management implementation overviews, and developer coding techniques.
  W3C: Template for Accessibility Evaluation Reports

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