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Re: Accessible Applications

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From: Karl Groves
Date: May 14, 2008 8:30AM

> So documentation on how procured Electronic and Information Technology
> (EIT)
> is not accessible is required.

Actually, the required documentation is to show that the procuring official
has done their market research to ensure that what they've purchased is the
most accessible product which meets business needs.

> An industry group worked with the GSA
> to
> produce a standard way of documenting this, the VPAT. Other forms of
> documentation will do, but why reinvent the wheel?

There are so many reasons why. First and foremost, vendor-supplied VPATS are
often insufficiently informative and often inaccurate. I've seen VPATS where
the vendor has marked "fully supports" for every provision - even ones which
don't even apply to the product! Secondly, procuring officials will take a
VPAT at face value without any further inquiry into the product just so they
can buy the product they want to buy. Third, a VPAT has no teeth. All it
does is fulfill a FAR Part 10 requirement for market research. Nothing
anywhere says that the VPAT (or any other documentation) defines acceptance
criteria for a procurement.

Don't get me wrong. Neither of these is a fault of the VPAT itself. I agree
that it can be a great tool if used correctly. In my opinion, VPATs should
be created by an independent third party who has actually performed an
assessment on the product. For instance, whenever my company creates a
VPAT, we have criteria defined for how much review is required before we'll
do one. It includes manual review as well as use case testing. This ensures
that we're sufficiently familiar with the product to make well informed
statements about the conformance level. Any areas where the product does
not fully support is described clearly in the document. Then a procuring
official has information in their hands which is accurate, reliable, and
based on thorough review.


Karl Groves
AIM/YIM: karlcore
Skype: eight.pistons
www.WebAccessStrategies.com

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