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Re: 508 asks for a VPAT what does W3C have that's similar

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From: Jonathan Metz
Date: Oct 22, 2013 1:58PM

Hi Lucia,

I sat in on a Section 508 training about a month or so ago. Bruce Bailey
of the Access Board was presenting about Section 508 Refresh weighing
heavily on WCAG 2.0. He made the recommendation that agencies start
applying WCAG to their projects now rather than later and they should do
so because of his interpretation of 1194.5.

Someone on Twitter recently asked what VPATs will be replaced with, and
Jared Smith suggested (ideally) the levels of conformance
<http://juicystudio.com/article/wcag-baseline-concept.php>; 'without all
the extra silly stuff
<http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/conformance.html>;¹.

Bruce and his co-presenter did state that the government will not be
looking at conformance claims. I did ask Bruce after the meeting about how
agencies should start to conduct required market research and he mentioned
that there wouldn't be anything available to replace the GPAT (which is
where we get VPATs from). He said that the current iteration was (he
thought) based on something HHS had put out. The VA took it and it ran
from there.

My opinion would be to maybe bastardize something from WebAIM's checklist
<http://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist>; and combine it somewhat with
the levels of conformance from Gez's site up above. We may even see some
other agency come up with a solution (like how we got it now), but
hopefully it makes more sense. A colleague from another company told me
recently that he came across something asking for a ŒPAT¹, or Product
Accessibility Template. He said it looked a little different, but I wasn¹t
able to see an example.

I can¹t imagine that there would be much need/reason to put any sort of
emphasis on AAA, since there is nothing in Section 508 Refresh that merits
anyone ever going above level AA. So maybe that makes it easier to create
a checklist to determine which vendors are up to snuff.

HTH,


Jon





On 10/22/13 2:06 PM, "Lucy Greco" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>Hello:
> As some of you may be aware UC just past a new access policy that
>requires W3c 2.0 as for any new development and or purchases. And I have
>been asked to participate in the first RFP that will be requiring this.
>it's so new I don't have any documentation created yet about How to look
>for and or check for this standard when evaluating venders. That long
>winded explanation is to ask what if anything is the equivalent of the
>VPAT for W3C 2.0 a and or aa or aaa thanks Lucy
>
>Lucia Greco
>Web Access Analyst
>IST-Campus Technology Services
>University of California, Berkeley
>(510) 289-6008 skype: lucia1-greco
>http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
>Follow me on twitter @accessaces
>>>