Digital Accessibility Testing and Training
Due to COVID-19, many people rely on digital services for everyday activities, including shopping, remote work, education, healthcare, and banking, and people with disabilities need these services more than ever before. As a result, lawsuits are increasing significantly as many courts agree that website accessibility is the law under the ADA. As you may know, Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that every owner, lessor, or operator of a “place of public accommodation” provide equal access to users who meet ADA standards for disability; this is being interpreted to include websites as “places of public accommodation. “Yes, website ADA compliance is required by law, but like stopping at a stop sign or buckling your seatbelt, it’s also the right and responsible thing to do.
Webinar Series
Webinar 1: ADA and Website Accessibility: Why It Matters
This course provides an overview of important web accessibility concepts suitable for both technical and non-technical audiences.
Length: 1 hour
Learning Objectives
The course covers:
- Why web accessibility matters
- Types of disabilities and the related challenges (Visual, Auditory, Motor, Cognitive, Seizure)
- The assistive technologies and methods used by people with disabilities to access the web
- Accessibility laws
- Accessibility myths and misconceptions
Webinar 2: The Basics of Web Accessibility
This course covers all the basic information to understand web accessibility and compliance, starting to cover technical and design topics.
Length:
Learning Objectives
This course covers:
- Introduction to Web Accessibility
- Core principles of accessibility and universal design (perceivable, operable, understandable, robust
- Overview and explanation of accessibility guidelines: WCAG (A, A.A., AAA)
- The Steps of an Accessibility Audit
- Common Issues for Web Accessibility
- Who defines what is accessible?
- Is My Website Accessible?
- Everyday Accessibility Aids
- Accessibility in Social Media
Webinar 3: Creating Accessible Content
This course will cover the general process of creating accessible content; the content included will be documents, emails, video, audio, etc.
Length:
Learning Objectives
Focusing on starting the creation process with accessibility in mind, this course covers:
- Creating with accessibility in mind
- Preparing an accessible base in the authoring program (such as Microsoft Word)
- PDF Accessibility
- Tools to check PDF accessibility (automated, manual, and assistive technology)
- Color, Contrast, and Fonts.
- Advanced Alternative Text
- Audiovisual Content.
- When is a description necessary in a video?
- Emails, tables, and context.
Webinar 4: Accessibility Testing with Screen Readers
An overview of the screen readers JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver. This course will teach you how to use screen readers to navigate the web and a systematic approach to testing webpages for accessibility using screen readers. This course applies to both sighted and non-sighted accessibility testers.
Length:
Learning Objectives
This course is designed to equip accessibility testers with:
- A general understanding of what screen readers are
- How screen readers read websites
- What screen readers are available
- Why webpages should be tested with screen readers
- The basics of how to use JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver on websites
- A systematic approach to testing webpages for accessibility using screen readers
Webinar 5: PDF Accessibility
PDFs also need to be accessible so that people with disabilities using screen readers, speech-to-text technology, or braille displayer get equal access. When you make your PDFs accessible, adding tags, bookmarks, alt text, and other information make the files readable and navigable to visually or mobility impaired users. Providing Accessible PDFs is now a requirement as per the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 508 & AODA. Just because a document is available as a downloadable PDF does not mean that it is an accessible PDF. As we know, PDFs are the go-to format for organizations to share information.
This course will teach you how to make your PDF accessible. We work with PDF/UA & Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 2.0 & 2.1. Meeting these standards for PDF accessibility ensures that documents comply with the requirements as per ADA, AODA & Section 508.
Length:
Learning Objectives
This course is designed to equip accessibility testers with:
- Identify the relevant Heading Structure
- Mark the languageof the document & the content
- Set the correct reading order
- Mark the lists
- Set the column and row headersfor simple & complex tables
- Set the bookmarks
- Correct the color contrastfor textual content (optional)
Accessibility Testing Overview
Background
Today, but with the power of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), every business website must be accessible to people with disabilities. The Law prohibits discrimination based on disability by places of “public accommodation,” meaning websites or brick-and-mortar facilities. 26% of American adults live with a disability, so it is a more significant issue than you may think, as lawsuits have more than tripled between 2018 and 2019. So, we know with the advent of the coronavirus that the lawsuits will continue as we continue to work in a virtual world.
Section 508, an amendment to the Rehabilitation act of 1973, mandates that all electronic and information technology systems, including websites, which are developed, procured, maintained, or used by the federal government, must be accessible to people with disabilities. We provide services to address website accessibility, PDF accessibility, and usability conformance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation act of 1973 and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). Section 508 Assured Service provides conformance and usability testing, validation, remediation services for websites and electronic documents.
Our Accessibility team not only checks for conformance with the Law but evaluates for usability. Our software is the first and only automatic, Artificial Intelligence-powered machine-learning web accessibility solution that complies with worldwide legislation and keeps websites compliant 24/7. It has one of the industry’s highest success rates and re-scans your website every 24 hours. We test for WCAG 2.1, which is a value, as that is currently the highest level, as most competitors are testing for WCAG 2.0.
There are two options to make your website accessible, automated solution, plug-ins, manual auditing, and remediation. Plug-ins can only change basic things on your websites, like fonts or colors. Manual testing and manual remediation can provide complete compliance but is a long process and often very expensive. Therefore, many businesses are turning to an AI solution with a manual audit of frequently accessed pages. AI solution would also allow you to keep your branding design intact. In the web accessibility market, most solutions require manual remediation, which entails lots of time and effort of skilled developers and accessibility experts and is very expensive. Our AI cuts out all that cost by automating the entire analysis and remediation process.
Accessibility Testers: Our Accessibility Testers are Certified Professionals in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC certified) by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. There are only 1400 certified professionals nationally/internationally, so we only work with the experts.
Phase 1
Initial Free Automated Testing: A code level audit will be conducted, utilizing automated tools to deliver the initial findings of all accessibility issues. Automated HTML validation can only identify 30% of WCAG 2.1 AA guideline failures. We test website pages for compliance with W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Section 508 standards. A report will be sent to you outlining the issues that need to be addressed based on the automated audit.
Please note: No website is 100% compliant, so we highly recommend a Manual Audit of your website’s most frequently accessed pages.
Phase 2
Manual Testing: Once your website is compliant and the scanning is complete; Manual Testing by web accessibility experts (IAAP certified) using assistive technologies will be conducted on your most frequently accessed pages. Manual testing will examine the website more closely than the automated tools, utilizing expert end users of assistive technology tools. The testers manually test selected web pages on your website and thoroughly document each unique WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 guideline failure and violation. During this testing period, any alteration to the website may cause errors and affect your test result.
Comprehensive Audit Report: This report will identify your accessibility issues from the manual audits on the frequently accessed pages, with best practices for remediation of your website.
Phase 3
Monitoring: Once your website is compliant, every 24 hours, the AI system performs a full scan and re-remediation to ensure ongoing compliance at the highest level. Our service allows you to “set it and forget it.”
Manual Audit: We also recommend every quarter that we test new frequently accessed pages or frequently accessed pages that may have been changed.
Additional Audits
PDF Accessibility Testing and Remediation: Our AI solution does not address PDFs; as with any AI solution, it can only test if the links work for a successful download, but it cannot test the content of the PDF. To make sure the content of your documents is accessible, we can offer our PDF accessibility checker. This digital tool checks whether a PDF document is accessible (readable) to everyone, including people with visual disabilities. This checker will be complemented by a manual check by accessibility professionals. The ADA regulations have defined that websites need to be accessible. PDF content comprises a large portion of that content, be it as downloadable links or as the content of iFrames. Our solution scans a website for PDF content and reports on the accessibility of the discovered documents. We test individual files and produce detailed accessibility compliance reports to the standard of your choice. A manual audit is a prerequisite to get remediation.
Mobile Testing: We can also test your websites on mobile devices, Android, and iOS to ensure that they are accessible with our AI Solution. However, our AI solution is not available for apps, but the manual audit is.
We test your website against WCAG 2.0, which are the internationally-accepted web accessibility guidelines. identify accessibility violations and get an overall accessibility compliance rating based on automated testing. Please use form below to audit
- Accessibility - check sites comply with WCAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1 (WAI) and Section 508 accessibility guidelines
- Usability - check against research based Usability.gov guidelines
- Plus check sites for broken links, browser compatibility and search engine guideline violations using more than 1200 standards based checkpoints
