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How do you assess your 3rd party vendors ?

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From: Will Skora
Date: May 9, 2018 3:43PM

For those who work at institutions (for example libraries, educational institutions, governments) that rely on 3rd party vendors for content, how do you, as an institution, assess them for accessibility?

Our institution will be explicitly including accessibility as a part of our criteria for determining which
3rd party vendors (e-learning resources, databases, digital asset managements) to purchase.

We're trying to determine a realistic (in our staff capacity) avenues to assess accessibility for current and prospective 3rd party vendors.

Do you run any automated or user testing on 3rd party vendors?
I've found about VPATs which can be a bit complex, and also not always an accurate representation of the vendors'
actual sites/resources when I've conducted automated tests (a11ymachine, AXE) on their pages.
Because what they state on a VPAT and what's in reality may not match, I'm leaning towards not using the VPATs at all.

When you've found any discrepancy between a vendor's VPAT and your own testing and requested them to fix the compliance issue?

For those not familiar with VPAT, check out
https://vpats.wordpress.com/
https://accessibility.oit.ncsu.edu/it-accessibility-at-nc-state/developers/accessibility-handbook/overview-understanding-the-nature-of-what-is-required-to-design-accessibly/voluntary-product-accessibility-template-vpat/

With the aforementioned issues of VPAT, I'm considering adopting a criteria checklist provided by the ASCLA (I've uploaded to my library's website - https://cpl.org/wp-content/uploads/think_accessible_before_you_buy.pdf
(Yes, I'm aware that it's a PDF).
into a score-based rubric to go with our other criteria. Thoughts? Do you already have a score card? What assessment do you do?

Thanks in advance for your attention and insight.

Regards,
Will Skora
Web Developer
Cleveland Public Library


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