WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: comprehensive list of keyboard accessible software?

for

From: Jonathan Metz
Date: Jul 31, 2013 8:20AM

>What you end up doing is assessing the impact of the flaws: does it
>prevent somebody from completing a task, or does it just make it a bit
>harder to complete, or is it only sort of annoying? Answering these
>questions requires judgment calls, and where there's judgment, there's
>bound to be disagreement.

Karl Groves talks about this a lot on his web site (follow that link to
Prioritization for some background)
http://www.karlgroves.com/2013/07/30/tracking-web-accessibility-success/.


>There must be a way of sharing this type of information that avoids those
>two things, but it would take a lot of work to be sure it's done
>properly. (How do we know the results of accessibility test were
>conducted by knowledgeable people and are reliable? How do we ensure the
>same tests are being done when they come from different sources? How are
>barrier assessments and mitigations documented?)

Since Section 508 is essentially going to be mirroring WCAG, I wonder what
harm it would be to bring back that model that Karl speaks about in
Prioritizing Accessibility, particularly with regards to VPATs. There are
a lot of things that are absolutely necessary to work, and there are other
things that are mainly salt on an open wound. Since the Refresh is getting
rid of categorization, this could be an ample opportunity for this stuff.

>Having this information openly available could help in getting vendors to
>compete with each other in this area, which could result in improved
>accessibility of procured ICT. However, it could also work the other way,
>if there is a market where none of the products have any meaningful
>accessibility. They may see it like not needing to run faster than the
>tiger, but only having to run faster than their competitors.

I think that having information widely open as you suggest would be a
great thing, if for no other reason than to generate some healthy
competition. However, unless agencies start to compare PATs instead of
just looking at whether it¹s been filled out, we¹ll continue to see really
bad accessibility templates.


Jon