WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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RE: Accessible portals

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From: Stewart, Ron
Date: Jun 10, 2005 1:42PM

Norman,

I always appreciate any and all constructive criticism, and are always
seeing to improve on our work. We always also solicit a response from
the vendor involved as well, but that almost never resulted in any
meaningful dialog, in fact in regard to SCT the opposite results has
occurred. The report is actually typical of our very pragmatic work
here at OSU in regards to can the application and/or interface actually
be used by a person with a disability for its intended purpose, using
commonly available assistive technologies. It is based on a standard
evaluation template we use for all of our work here at Oregon State.

The report is based on the evaluation protocols I developed here at OSU
which are a hybrid of WAI and Section 508 primarily focused on
usability. They actually predate the Section 508 standards, and were
initially developed at the same time the WAI standards were under
development. As most know, usability and compliance have little to do
with each other in the real world use of technologies by persons
primarily with print related access issues, and to be truly honest
everyone who tries to use most of these very user-unfriendly systems.

Here is the link to the documents we use for our process:
http://tap.oregonstate.edu/standards.htm, as a part of the policy draft
by clicking on the applicable standards link you will find a comparison
of our standards with both the WAI and with Section 508. This policy
development effort is an ongoing project, and it is our hope that we
will continue to refine and improve our process.

Ron