Testing Environments Impact the Lives of Americans

Scenario

For the past 8 years, Marisela has worked as an administrative assistant in the central offices of a temporary staffing agency. Her job responsibilities include technical writing, bookkeeping and accounting responsibilities, as well as other miscellaneous clerical duties. Though her original job responsibilities did not specifically require any experience with programming or Web-based technologies, Marisela took it upon herself to create a Web site for her employer, which has proven to be an invaluable tool for recruiting both potential employees and prospective host employer sites. Over the years, the site grew more and more complex as Marisela incorporated their company databases into the site, using advanced server-side scripting technologies and techniques that she learned on her own.

During the time that she was teaching herself these Web technologies, Marisela made sure that the resources would be accessible to people with disabilities. In a sense, she had to. Marisela herself is blind. She had to make sure that she would be able to make use of the Web site she was creating.

Marisela uses a screen reader - a software program that converts text on a computer screen into synthesized speech, so that users can listen and interact with computers in an audio environment. Marisela's screen reader allows her to create the HTML content and to write the code necessary to connect her Web site to databases and to provide users with a high quality experience. She does rely on other people to create the graphics and to give her feedback on the visual appearance of the Web site, but she is in charge of the Web programming.

Three months ago, Marisela decided that she was ready to seriously pursue a career in Web programming. She felt that she had acquired the necessary skills to be a programmer, through self-initiated on-the-job training. She began to search for job opportunities at other companies in the area where she lived. She soon discovered that all of the desirable jobs required more than on-the-job training. They required some sort of certification to prove that she was skilled in the Web programming language that she had taught herself.

From her own experience, Marisela knew that standardized tests can be difficult, if not impossible, for a blind person to complete without assistance, so she became concerned. The accommodations that she was offered in the past were always less than ideal, and she felt that her performance on some tests in the past had been compromised as the result of the accommodation process. Even beyond that, she simply did not like the idea of having to depend on someone else's help to perform a function that she was perfectly capable of doing on her own - or at least that she could have performed on her own if the tests had been created with accessibility in mind.

Marisela called some of these companies to find out more about the certification requirements. She was relieved to find out that it was possible to take the certification test over the Internet. This meant that she would be able to use her own screen reader and complete the test independently. She registered for the test, paid the fee, and began to take the test.

Although the interface was somewhat confusing to her, Marisela was able to figure it out and make her way to the test questions. She did not have any significant difficulties accessing and responding to the first few questions. They were straightforward questions, written in regular text that required her to pick from a list of possible answers. She noticed that the buttons did not have labels, as they should have, but she was able to figure out which button belonged to which answer based on the context within the Web page. However, Marisela soon discovered that she was not going to be able to complete the test without help after all. Some of the test questions referred to graphics that did not have alternative text. The questions were phrased in such a way that they required a person to see the images. These questions began with phrases like, "Based on the error message shown in 'Figure 1..." or "Which of the two screen shots below..." These questions were completely unanswerable for Marisela.

She might have been able to answer these questions if they did not require her to see the pictures, but she was not given a chance to prove that she either did or did not know the answer. Because the test was timed, she did not have time to find someone else to help her with the visual aspects of the test. She decided to simply guess on the questions that were inaccessible to her. As might be expected, she did not receive a score high enough to qualify her for the jobs she was seeking.

The Promise of Future Online Tests

This scenario shows that inaccessible online tests can have a direct negative impact on the lives of people with disabilities. They cause unnecessary stress by imposing artificial barriers on the personal and professional progress of people with disabilities. It may be true that current accommodation systems can make many tests accessible to people with disabilities, but these current accommodations often compromise the independence and privacy of people with disabilities. The better solution is to make tests directly accessible to people with disabilities.

Let us suppose, for a moment, that the creators of the test in this scenario had considered the importance of disability access when they were creating the test. The end result would be that Marisela is able to take the online test independently and without encountering any disabling barriers. The test designers would be able to claim that their test is accessible to people with disabilities, and would thus be able to expand their market into a whole new segment of the population that up until now has not had the chance to take accessible online tests.