Overview

The Digital Accessibility Office (DAO) offers manual accessibility testing for any digital technology that CU creates, buys, or maintains. We have an in-house testing lab that relies on the experience and expertise of individuals with disabilities using different types of assistive technologies.

The testing service focuses on testing for user experience over solely reviewing items from a compliance perspective. We take a holistic approach when testing: ensuring that individuals can engage with and complete necessary tasks within a given environment rather than only looking at individual elements.

Assessing Accessibility

A manual test is the only way to determine how accessible a product is. Although there are other ways to get a sense of the accessibility of a product, they do not provide a full picture.

  • Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a report from the vendor about how accessible their tool or product is. The 鈥淰鈥� stands for 鈥渧oluntary鈥� so the information may not demonstrate the entire picture.
  • Accessibility Roadmaps are another resource from the vendor to show what issues they are aware of and their timeline for fixing the issues.
  • Vendor accessibility statements can be helpful in knowing who to contact about accessibility issues, but they do not provide a sense of how often a product is tested, what issues they are aware of, and how they plan to fix the issues.

Automated tests may be used to test the accessibility of a product, but the results should be used cautiously. Automated tests do not check for all issues and can miss the nuance needed for usability assessments.

While these documents don鈥檛 provide a full picture, we may still ask for them in order to determine testing priorities and needs.

Goals

  • Relying on systematic testing, provide the university with reliable information about the accessibility of web sites and software applications.
  • Provide recommendations and evaluations of products so service owners can make the best decision for all users on campus.
  • Assist campus to improve the quality of our IT systems and through that improve the campus environment for people with disabilities.

Location

The Digital Accessibility Office is located in the Regent Administrative Center, room 1B54, and can be emailed at AUL@Colorado.EDU.