Gurpreet Kaur: Welcome to procure access.
Gurpreet Kaur: Launched in July 2022. Procure access is a business to business initiative
Gurpreet Kaur: facilitated by disability in
Gurpreet Kaur: and a new component of disability in digital accessibility program. It brings together companies that recognize the importance of buying and selling technology
Gurpreet Kaur: that is accessible to people with disabilities.
Gurpreet Kaur: Accessible procurement is multifaceted, and requires the work, commitment, and attention of many people and business units.
Gurpreet Kaur: Within the organization
Gurpreet Kaur: there is lots to do, and at times it can feel overwhelming.
Gurpreet Kaur: The procure access. Building blocks, simplify things.
Gurpreet Kaur: Think of the blocks as a quick start guide for your accessible
Gurpreet Kaur: procurement journey. They are the foundation
Gurpreet Kaur: of a successful program.
Gurpreet Kaur: There are 8 building blocks in this series.
Gurpreet Kaur: Today's building block is titled Testing for accessibility. My name is Gutpreet Kor, and I'm the global head of accessibility and inclusive design at mastercard
Gurpreet Kaur: starting with testing products for accessibility. So accessible procurement doesn't end when the contract is signed.
Gurpreet Kaur: It's important to make sure your delivered product meets contract accessibility requirements.
Gurpreet Kaur: and that you adopt best practices to keep accessibility on track after the product is in use.
Gurpreet Kaur: So know that testing for accessibility truly is a journey.
Gurpreet Kaur: Of course
Gurpreet Kaur: much of the focus is on the contract process. though it is important to test for accessibility prior to purchase.
Gurpreet Kaur: and throughout the life of the product and the contract.
Gurpreet Kaur: This can be done by placing testing requirements in contracts and evaluating test results at delivery
Gurpreet Kaur: and during contract term best practices include
Gurpreet Kaur: assigning accessibility and usability. Testing has a role in the procurement process
Gurpreet Kaur: developing a testing checklist and continuing testing
Gurpreet Kaur: during broad usage and renewals.
Gurpreet Kaur: It is important to note that testing for accessibility is critical
Gurpreet Kaur: in all phases of procurement process.
Gurpreet Kaur: For example, as a buyer you can validate
Gurpreet Kaur: the voluntary product accessibility template during Rfb process.
Gurpreet Kaur: you can do more comprehensive testing once the product is delivered.
Gurpreet Kaur: of course. that will the impact of the product.
Gurpreet Kaur: From a seller point of view, it is helpful for you to infuse accessibility throughout your product development
Gurpreet Kaur: as it will provide you the unique edge over a lot of other similar products on the market.
Gurpreet Kaur: So how are we gonna do it? You have to work with the right stakeholders. identify the scope. identify the issue tracking system. Whether that's Jira azure excel.
Gurpreet Kaur: create a test plan and then start accessibility, evaluation.
Gurpreet Kaur: How you do evaluation is you identify. If you're testing for accessibility, usability, functionality, etcetera. In the report
Gurpreet Kaur: you identify all Vic A/C success criteria that apply to the application
Gurpreet Kaur: check against the components. Library, if available. perform both automated and manual testing
Gurpreet Kaur: and perform manual testing with assistive technologies used by people with disabilities. For example, screen reader, magnifier voice recognition.
Gurpreet Kaur: just to summarize working with right stakeholders. To identify the scope of testing is extremely important. If you do not have the right stakeholders and or tools in-house to do the testing, you might have to rely on third party vendors
Gurpreet Kaur: to conduct the testing.
Gurpreet Kaur: The most important thing is to remember that any automated tools
Gurpreet Kaur: can only detect roughly
Gurpreet Kaur: 20 to 30% of accessibility issues.
Gurpreet Kaur: and it is essential to conduct manual accessibility testing by people with lived experiences or certified professionals. So you have a full understanding of ex state of accessibility, compliance of the delivered product.
Gurpreet Kaur: one.
Gurpreet Kaur: You have to define the scope of the evaluation defining what is included in the evaluation, the goal of evaluation and the level of vicag compliance you want to accomplish. Usually that would come directly from the contract, which is whether it's level, a double a or triple a.
Gurpreet Kaur: you explore the website
Gurpreet Kaur: by identifying key web pages, key functionality type of web content designs.
Gurpreet Kaur: functionality and the required web technologies.
Gurpreet Kaur: You select a representative sample to perform testing which is guidance on structured and randomly selected web pages when it is not visible to evaluate every web page on the side.
Gurpreet Kaur: You evaluate the selected sample by determining success and failures in meeting vic criteria. accessibility, support for website features
Gurpreet Kaur: and recording evaluation steps.
Gurpreet Kaur: And then, last, but not least, you report on the evaluation findings. You aggregate and report evaluation findings, make evaluation statements and calculate overall scores.
Gurpreet Kaur: Now you might be thinking, do we need to do this level of testing for every product we're purchasing?
Gurpreet Kaur: The answer is, no. I follow, trust, but verify model
Gurpreet Kaur: initially. You might need to verify the work delivered by the supplier. But as you get visibility into the accessibility, culture, and the quality of the work of a supplier, you will start to build more trust in what they are delivering.
Gurpreet Kaur: So I often say what you cannot measure. You cannot improve on so defining the metrics and outcomes and establishing the current baseline is extremely important. The examples of some of the metrics. You can track our past test case percentages failed. Test case percentages, fixed effects.
Gurpreet Kaur: accepted defects.
Gurpreet Kaur: defects that are rejected by development, team critical defects versus non-critical and average time. It takes for development team to repair defects. Of course, these are only some of the examples of accessibility data that you can collect. That was performed during accessibility testing
Gurpreet Kaur: this type of data about the accessibility bugs of the product allows you to work closely with the vendor supplier, to determine not only the accuracy of the vpat template that may have been provided.
Gurpreet Kaur: but also an opportunity for the vendor to provide an accurate accessibility, remediation, timeline.
Gurpreet Kaur: So there is a wide variety of website scanning tools that are built into browsers. For example, Microsoft accessibility, insights.
Gurpreet Kaur: axe.
Gurpreet Kaur: wave, etc. In addition, there are also numerous paid third party software providers
Gurpreet Kaur: that provide even more robust web scanning software options.
Gurpreet Kaur: Each of these tools have their unique characteristics. So you should do your research to determine the best fit for your company.
Gurpreet Kaur: for Esther has a paid research report that compares a lot of these tools and would be helpful to refer to. As you make this decision.
Gurpreet Kaur: As I said before, it is essential to test the delivered products with assistive technologies used by your customers or users with disabilities.
Gurpreet Kaur: Some examples of those would be jaws. Nvda voiceover zoom text for magnification. Dragon. Naturally speaking, dictation, software.
Gurpreet Kaur: Bluetooth keyboards, etc. Some other things that you should test for are one test the product with a keyboard and ensure that it is not built only for mouse
Gurpreet Kaur: to ensure that there are captions and transcription for videos.
Gurpreet Kaur: 3.
Gurpreet Kaur: Ensure that the videos do not contain flashing, causing seizures in your audience with photosensitive epilepsy. Of course, these are only
Gurpreet Kaur: specific examples and not comprehensive examples of what you can test.
Gurpreet Kaur: You can find more information about this building block on the disability in procure access website.
Gurpreet Kaur: Https Colon. forward, slash forward, slash.
Gurpreet Kaur: disabilityn.org, forward, slash! What hyphen we hyphen do forward, slash, procure hyphen access forward slash.
Gurpreet Kaur: Here you will find the tools and resources you need to establish an accessible procurement program within your organization.
Gurpreet Kaur: Be sure to watch the test for accessibility fireside Chat Video, where you will learn how an industry leader implemented this building block within their organization.
Gurpreet Kaur: Also be sure to visit the other 7 building blocks in this series.
Gurpreet Kaur: Thank you.