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Re: Getting Your Website Accessibility Certified

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From: Miriam Fukushima
Date: Sep 19, 2019 12:35AM

Hello Sudheer,


I'm from Germany and we have a way of certifying that a at a certain
point in time certain analyzed pages were accessible according to our
Version of the WCAG namely BITV 2.0.

In my experience this gives a false sense of security. Because customers
that want to take the BITV-Test and get a certificate would do anything
to pass the test which does not necessarily mean it does anything for
actual accessibility.

It also fosters the impression that once the test is passed, there is no
need to work on accessibility any further.

For example I would adjust the site on a technical level and advise the
customer on how to revise the content and the customer would edit the
pages that are likely to be analyzed.

But after passing the test, the content is reedited or new content
follows none of the advice I gave.


And I often find that complex features of a site are not considered in
the guidelines for the test and are therefore not implemented before the
test or turned off to assure the passing of the test instead of really
tackling the issue of making them accessible.

But later on they are implemented anyway without any regard to
accessibility.

Because of that I had also customers not wanting to consider
accessibility at all because they thought they would not pass the test
anyway or only with too high costs and without a certificate as sort of
a reward, accessibility would not be worth the effort.


Kind regards Miriam.

On 18.09.2019 21:15, Sudheer Babu wrote:
> Hey Everyone,
>
> Can someone please explain on how to get your web application accessibility
> certified. Are there any formal ways of getting certified and also does
> this vary from country to country?
>
> Any more information on the same would be really helpful.
>
> Thanks in advance
> Sudheer.
> > > >