Dames and Evans "Accessibility Reporting and User Experiences"

This presentation was provided by Joni Dames of Wiley, and Sam Evans of The International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) for the sixth session of NISO's 2024 Training Series "DEIA in the Scholarly Landscape." Session Six: 'Accessibility in Metadata,' was held July 18, 2024.

1. Accessibility Reporting and User Experiences

2. Accessibility Reporting Companies selling products and services should be able to provide a document showing how accessible their content is. This will help you start to understand if the product or service should be usable for a disabled person. While these documents are technical in nature, understanding what it means when certain functions or interactive elements are: Supported Partially Supported Not Supported Not applicable

3. What kind of document should I ask for? The first rule of accessibility documentation club We often don’t talk about the fact that people interchange the following acronyms. Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) Accessibility Compliance Report (ACR) This is the template once completed or filled out This is what you can read to tell how well the product/service supports disabled people

4. VPAT vs ACR A VPAT is indeed an empty template An ACR is the data you want to read Yes vendors and even some accessibility professionals will use either or/both acronyms to talk about the document

5. Accessibility Reporting Alphabet Soup Web Content Authoring Guidelines - WCAG (International standards for digital accessibility) 2.0 – has been replaced 2.1 – most US government agencies and businesses 2.2 – current, but not implemented in most countries in 2024 Americans with Disability Act - ADA Section 508 (US Federal Government Agencies + other public entities) May include “chapters” about hardware and other elements EN 301 549 – Harmonized Accessibility Standard (EU and recently adopted by Canada) Goes beyond WCAG

6. Best when used by… An ACR is only valid for a moment in time As soon as another line of code or version is deployed, all of the content in the ACR may be no longer valid An ACR is only as good as the methodology and process followed for its testing This should be covered on page one and should include: Manual or automated testing or both Operating systems Assistive technologies Does the ACR provide all 78 WCAG Success Criteria? It’s okay if they say not applicable Watch out of only 15 or 30 success criteria being reported Why did they skip so many elements?

7. Who is impacted? You can read through ACRs and see what elements are not supported or partially supported. For every element not supported or partially supported that means a disabled person won’t fully be able to engage Or their assistive technology of choice isn’t supported Or the best practice to avoid causing harm or undue additional effort is not supported

8. How do disabled people use digital tech? Accessibility should allow disabled people to use digital technology in an equitable way to anyone who is not-yet-disabled. This means digital technology should be accessible and usable no matter what operating system, browser, or platform for documents. Since we will not know what sort of technology or assistive technology someone has access to or uses, good accessibility testing and reporting will test: Across operating systems Across browsers Across a variety of types of assistive technologies

9. Who, Why, How, and What We have to put people first to understand the user experience. We first have to understand the WHO – the person Then we can understand the WHY – the needs of the person Then we can consider the HOW – what format and considerations do we need to make part of our process Then we can get to the WHAT – which is the product or service and delivery mechanism

10. User Experience (UX) Understanding disability and barriers disabled people face will help you first seek to understand UX Tools only work on a Mac The assistive technology doesn’t follow the existing tech (PDF) Understanding barriers in digital technology will help you understand how to connect an ACR to UX Watch for those does not and partially supports fields

11. Next we’ll hear from George who will share lessons learned and more about accessible document publishing platforms