Voluntarily Excellent When It Comes To Accessibility: A New Reviewer-Friendly VPAT
338 | Sat 03 Aug 5:30 p.m.–6:15 p.m.
Presented by
-
Chris Knapp
https://www.knappstrategic.com/accessiversity
Chris Knapp is an accessibility consultant/tester who operates a disability-owned business called Accessiversity. Chris joined the Sakai community in 2020 to help out with accessibility testing/quality assurance, and now serves as The Sakai Accessibility Team Lead. As someone who is statutorily blind and has to rely on screen readers and other assistive technology to interact with a complex web application like Sakai, Chris is uniquely positioned to understand and articulate the specific needs of these users, while providing for an authentic accessibility experience. Chris is also a member of the Sakai PMC.
Chris Knapp
https://www.knappstrategic.com/accessiversity
Abstract
VPAT and HECVAT (Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit) are a partial solution to the problem of determining what competing products show better compliance with standards. They are also good instruments for planning how to equitably roll out an adoption with full understanding of the compliance gaps of the chosen product.
But standard compliance information cannot tell the whole story. It is a snapshot in time that does not speak to the culture of the vendor, where the product has been, and more importantly, where it is going. In this session, we will detail Sakai’s multi-year effort to develop and implement a community-sourced accessibility strategy, that eventually led us to produce our own VPAT, and the steps we took to reimagine the standard VPAT format with the VPAT reviewer audience in mind.
VPAT and HECVAT (Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit) are a partial solution to the problem of determining what competing products show better compliance with standards. They are also good instruments for planning how to equitably roll out an adoption with full understanding of the compliance gaps of the chosen product. But standard compliance information cannot tell the whole story. It is a snapshot in time that does not speak to the culture of the vendor, where the product has been, and more importantly, where it is going. In this session, we will detail Sakai’s multi-year effort to develop and implement a community-sourced accessibility strategy, that eventually led us to produce our own VPAT, and the steps we took to reimagine the standard VPAT format with the VPAT reviewer audience in mind.