General Escalation Process
When critical issues are found, we alert the vendor of those issues and work with them to resolve the issues. This often includes educating the vendor on how disabled people navigate their site with assistive technology and best practices on coding for digital accessibility. However, on occasion, some vendors may refuse to address critical issues. In that case, we need to follow a formal issue escalation process. The digital accessibility team:
- Identifies a critical accessibility issue through testing or is alerted of an critical accessibility issue by a campus.
- Documents the accessibility issue in the accessibility tracker and alerts the Product Owner of the issue.
- Works with the internal Product Owner to engage the vendor via email or submits a case to the vendor if the vendor uses case management.
- If a vendor refuses to fix a critical issue or does not respond (identified as a blocker in the tracker), the digital accessibility team changes the status of the issue to Vendor declined to fix and alerts the Product Owner of the vendor's response.
- In addition, if a vendor gives a deadline and goes past that deadline, we would need to escalate issue.
- Alerts Executive Leadership that the vendor is refusing to fix a critical issue with the product - Executive Leadership to inform the team of the best way to alert them - either via Slack or Email.
- Leadership requests a follow up meeting if needed or confirms scheduling an urgent meeting with the vendor.
- Works with the Product Owner and the vendor to schedule a discussion between our team and the vendor's team with identified President's Office department leadership present.
- Presents critical issue overview at Digital Accessibility Governance to keep all governance members aware of the critical issue and the vendor's current stance.
- If the vendor continues to refuse to fix the issue, the Digital Accessibility team escalates the issue to legal with detailed information on the steps taken and both the user and legal impact of the issue. The Digital Accessibility team will also ask legal to keep designated leadership in the loop on the legal case.
- Legal reviews the legal advice request and provides a recommended path forward.
Specific Critical Issues that Need Legal Engagement in the Background from the Beginning
Accessibility Overlays
If a vendor installs an accessibility overlay on their product, legal should be aware that we are entering into discussions with the vendor to remove the overlay. Overlay discussions can be hard to navigate as the vendor's that implement them do not engage with the accessibility community on a regular basis and have spent money on a product they believe will fix accessibility issues with their product. Some vendors are easy to educate and will remove the overlay. However, legal should be prepared to step in if a vendor refuses to remove the overlay as each day the overlay exists on a product increases our overall legal risk.
User Reported Barrier
When a member of the general public, employee or student reports an issue with one of our products, legal should be aware in the background and be kept up to date on how we are working with the vendor to address the issue.
Issues Escalated by Legal
In some cases, legal may become aware of a critical accessibility issue due to a campus raising the issue to the legal office. In that case, legal will loop in the Digital Accessibility team, who will keep them updated on the issue until it has been fixed.