February 17, 2021 ATHEN Meeting - Continuation of discussion that happened in January Quarterly meeting
Recap of our talk:
Whether you trust or respond of the person that responds to a list message asking for information about XYZ product:
- discussion around competency and qualifications to test a product or application.
- discussion around whether the response goes directly to the individual and not the whole list, the idea that a lot of times if people do respond to the whole list it's very general information and not a lot of specifics around the accessibility of a product.
Performing accessibility testing yourself:
- discussed tools that are commonly used
- how you do test the products often depends on how much the product is going to be used on your campus or who the population is for using that product.
- this often determines how deep or extensive your testing is.
- everyone came to a consensus that we don't use screen readers alone and there are other ways to test a product without relying on a screen reader
- requirements for vendors to have third-party reviews as a part of their RFP or proposal for the university
- third parties paying for review of software
Ideal: Testing, Procurement, VPATs, Accessibility of Software
- One location to get (accurate and updated) information
- A repository of accessibility evaluation findings
- Sharing of information so people don’t need to re-create the wheel or re-do efforts
- Pressure the vendors to make improvements with a unified approach (i.e. many people telling them the same things)
- EDUCAUSE has tried to do this, success is maybe more miss than hit
- A high level goal is to put pressure on vendors to improve accessibility. If all of higher ed bands together, we have tremendous leverage.
- Vendors don’t rely on HE to get free labor; they have people internally to do this
- Higher Ed would then verify but not do the actual work
- Vendors do their homework and figure out what accessibility really is and not rely on us to educate them
- Where would vendors go for this training??
- Don’t need additional personnel to figure out if something is accessible or not
- Stronger laws that require accessibility
- Procurement workflows exist at each institution that prioritize accessibility the way that security is prioritized
- Figure out some way to still use industry-specific software that is inaccessible in order to keep open business lines at the school (i.e. saying “no” to a certain tech could limit the business interests of that school) that doesn’t take away the need to make that software accessible
- Equally Effective Alternate Access Plan (EEAAP) process for “when we can’t say no” to inaccessible software
- Who manages EEAAP? Who pays for EEAAP? Is the accommodation equal? Who signs off on this?
- Equally Effective Alternate Access Plan (EEAAP) process for “when we can’t say no” to inaccessible software
- Ensure that accessibility and innovation don’t conflict
- Integrate accessibility into the RFP process
- Get vendors to compete with each other over accessibility
- One include accessibility language in all our contracts.