When should the Accessibility Team be engaged?
The Digital Accessibility Team should be involved in every phase of a product’s lifecycle.
How to request testing
Submit a case as early as possible for the UITS - Digital Experience team with the following information:
- Overview of what will need to be tested.
- Information about who will or does use the product.
- Estimated timeline for testing.
Step by Step Testing Process Completed by Accessibility Team
- Engages campus digital accessibility teams in the testing process when a product will be used by the President’s Office and multiple campuses.
- Reviews Accessibility Conformance Report from the vendor or relevant accessibility documentation.
- Reviews completed Accessible Procurement Questionnaire.
- Participates in Vendor demos of product used assistive technology.
- Completes internal manual testing of product with various types of assistive technology.
- Documents all accessibility issue findings in the Accessibility Tracker, records videos so vendor can recreate issues, and submit issues with recordings to vendor.
- Works with the General Counsel and Procurement to update a new or up-for-renewal contract with an accessibility remediation timeline as needed.
- Provides ongoing updates to the product owner and any identified leadership on vendor's accessibility efforts.
- Works directly with the vendor to fix and re-test issues.
- Follows the critical issue escalation process when a vendor refuses to fix or does not respond when a critical issue is submitted.
- Engages in ongoing testing of the product during upgrades and when new features are released.
Types of Manual Testing Conducted by the Digital Accessibility Team
| Manual Testing | Impacted Communities |
|---|---|
| Screen Readers (NVDA and VoiceOver) | Blind, Low Vision, Deafblind |
| Speech Recognition Software (Voice Control) | Mobility, Low Vision |
| Display Modes (High Contrast, Reduced Motion, Dark Mode, Color Filters) | Vestibular Disorders, Traumatic Head Injuries, Motion Sensitivity, Low Vision, Colorblind |
| Screen Magnification Software and Browser Zoom | Low Vision |
| Keyboard-Only | Mobility |
| Text-to-Speech Software | Neurodivergent, Low Vision |
| Contrast Analyzer | Colorblind, Low Vision |
| Manual content review (Links, Captions, Transcripts, etc.) | Colorblind, Low Vison, Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Deafblind |
What the team needs for successful testing and vendor fixes
- A list of business processes to test within the product.
- Access to a staging or test environment with proper security access.
- Test scripts to follow, such as functional test scripts or user job aids.
- Once testing is complete, access to the vendor’s accessibility or development testing team to work on identified issues.
- Escalation to leadership and then legal when the vendor refuses to fix critical barriers.
How We Prioritize and Manage Third-Party Product Testing
All third-party product testing is managed through the Accessibility Tracker. The Accessibility Tracker allows us to capture the following:
- Key information about a product, such as the product contract language, Accessibility Conformance Report, both the internal and external product owner, and an overall history of accessibility testing in relation to that product.
- Issues associated with each product. Issues are entered individually so we can track the status of each issue along with the issue impact information (who is impacted, what types of assistive technology, and whether the impact will block the user from completing a process).
Compliance review priority statuses
- Critical - Vendor is using an overlay
- Critical - Barriers submitted by impacted end user
- Critical - High Usage and Known Compliance Issues
- Critical - High Usage and Compliance Status Unknown
- Medium - Targeted Audience and Known Compliance Issues
- Medium - Targeted Audience and Compliance Status Unknown
- Low - Usage Varies but No Barriers