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Improving Accessibility Procurement

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From: Mike Gifford
Date: Mar 30, 2017 12:58PM

Hi,

Some of you may have seen this, but I'm trying to pull together some best practices for boiler-plate contracts & RFPs. I've got some examples up here:
https://github.com/mgifford/a11y-contracting <https://github.com/mgifford/a11y-contracting>

Generally, when I try to fix a problem, I find it useful to look upstream to see if it could be caused by something earlier in the system.

Procurement seems to be a common point of failure in improving accessibility. Often, it's just another of a long list of issues in an RFP and everyone knows that it's going to be left to the end (and overlooked).

What are the best practices to see that:
- the right product and the right people are selected to do the job
- that the process used to generate the IT follows best practices
- that updates to the software don't break accessibility

Anyways, I'd love to have people submit suggestions of best practices. I've set up a wiki for links here:
https://github.com/mgifford/a11y-contracting/wiki

I found this very interesting orphaned page (last updated August 6, 2015):
<https://www.justice.gov/crt/508/report/content.htm>
https://www.justice.gov/crt/increased-coordination

It makes reference to other documents that look very interesting. I think with more digging & Archive.org <http://archive.org/>; it would be possible to find better resources. However, it wasn't easy to find the text of the sample contract language and procurement practices which are alluded to.

Mike
--
Mike Gifford, President, OpenConcept Consulting Inc.
Drupal 8 Core Accessibility Maintainer - https://drupal.org/user/27930
Twitter: @mgifford @openconcept_ca

Open source web development for social change - http://openconcept.ca
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