When purchasing or renewing tools or services, it’s important to check for accessibility. Many tools out there have unsupported claims or a lack of commitment to accessibility.
- Check for accessibility: When choosing tools or services, ensure they are accessible to people with disabilities, as it’s a $1.9 trillion market and laws are being enforced worldwide.
- Be cautious of red flags: Tools that claim to be the number one solution, promise legal compliance, or make unrealistic promises may be lying about their accessibility.
- Look for evidence of regular testing: A good tool should have a regular testing process in place, with evidence of ongoing accessibility checks.
- Check for proper use of conformance vs. compliance: A tool should claim conformance with accessibility standards, not compliance with laws.
- Involve users with disabilities in testing: A tool should be tested by people with disabilities and assistive technology users to ensure it’s truly accessible.
- Ask the right questions: When evaluating a tool, ask how the company ensures accessibility, what standards they test to, and how often they test.
Transcript
Have you been looking for new tools or services to go with your marketing, your website, your social media, or your email newsletters? Well, it’s important to check for accessibility when you’re doing this.
The reason is accessible tools matter. People with disabilities make up a $1.9 trillion market that is a ton of money, and you want to make sure to include those people and that audience.
Laws in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Australia, and more countries are coming into effect or are already in effect. And very importantly, accessible websites score better on SEO and usability for everyone.
Now that we know why we need accessibility in our tools, it’s important to know how to actually screen these tools. If we don’t have a background in accessibility, the big question you want to ask yourself is, are these tools lying about their accessibility?
Types of information you find
Generally speaking, you will see four types of information on a tool’s website about their accessibility.
First are tools that say nothing. Second are tools that are lying to you. Third are tools that did accessibility once and then forgot about it. And last, and unfortunately, the smallest group are tools that are actually good.
Tools that say nothing. Well, pretty much you just do a control F on the website and you don’t find the word accessibility, accessible or anything else. They have probably never tested their tools or their website for accessibility, and you should expect that it is probably a train wreck behind the scenes and there are a lot of problems.
Marketing lies
The next group are the tools that lie. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of lying in marketing out there. Here are some big things to watch out for.
These are big red flags. They claim to be the number one solution. Just about everyone claims to be the number one solution, and they can’t all be. In fact, probably none of them that are claiming to be the number one solution are actually the number one solution.
Second, red flag. They promise legal compliance. A tool can’t give you legal compliance alone. Legal compliance is with an entire law, and it is a very comprehensive activity that the entire business must engage in. So no, a tool can’t give you legal compliance.
Next up is no accessibility statement. If they haven’t even figured out how to add an accessibility statement to their website, they probably haven’t figured out much of anything in terms of accessibility.
They claim that they will make your website fully accessible or 100% accessible. That’s not possible. That would be like claiming that a building was accessible to absolutely every single person in every possible configuration. Assistive mobility impairment, etc. They can’t promise that. It’s just not possible.
No proof. A number of websites will say our Tool is accessible. Okay, great. Do you have any information to support that? And the answer is no. They just said it was accessible. Don’t believe them without proof.
Too good to be true
And the last one is too good to be true. Anytime someone makes you a promise that sounds too good to be true, you should be very concerned.
Here’s an example of a huge red flag. There’s a website tool out there that promises to cover $10,000. This tool also costs less than $500. That sounds a bit too good to be true.
Well, when you actually look into the terms of service that you have to agree to, it says, well, we cover $10,000, but we don’t cover any fines or penalties. We don’t cover any punitive or exemplary damages, we don’t cover any remediation costs, we don’t cover any attorney fees, and we don’t cover anything settled out of court.
Well, if you know anything about accessibility lawsuits, just about every lawsuit gets settled out of court. Very few actually go to court and make it all the way to a judgment. So essentially they’re going to cover just about nothing.
Lack ongoing testing
Then we have tools that did accessibility once. Well, accessibility is a lot like security. It is an ongoing endeavor. And you can’t just check it once. You need to keep checking it on a regular basis.
Some tools were tested in part or in full for accessibility at some point in the past. That’s great. That is a whole lot better than the tools which did nothing. Unfortunately, things need to be tested on an ongoing basis. So you need to look for evidence of regular testing.
Good tools with ongoing testing
Finally, we have the tools that are good. Things that highlight these good tools. Things that I look for on their websites is the proper use of conformance versus compliance. Conformance is with a standard. So conformance means I have a list of specific criteria that I can actually say I meet or I don’t meet. That’s a good thing.
We want to look for conformance. If they say compliance, they reference compliance with a law. They reference that their tool may assist with compliance rather than saying their tool will produce compliance.
Here’s an example quote. An accessible website that conforms with web content accessibility guidelines, WCAG, which will help you meet requirements under ADA section 508, AODA and other laws.
They’re not claiming that they do absolutely everything.
Also, we want to look for regular testing, some evidence on their site that shows that they are undergoing a regular testing process for smaller sites. The expectation is probably on an annual basis that there’s some testing. For large websites, large organizations, you would expect it to be more often quarterly or even monthly, depending on how much is being developed. It should definitely be a part of any company’s QA process.
Then you want to check to make sure that they are actually having people test their websites who have real disabilities and use assistive technology on a daily basis. These are the people who really know how that technology operates, what kind of gotchas it’s going to run into. This is really, really important to actually having accessible tool.
And of course you want to look for documentation on how to set up the tool in an accessible manner. Just because a tool can produce an accessible result doesn’t mean that every single configuration will produce that.
What questions to ask
So here are some questions that you can go ahead and ask of different companies if you’re looking at their tools.
How does the company ensure that the tool is accessible?
What standards do they test to?
How often do they test?
Are users with disabilities involved in the testing process?
So next time you are looking to buy a tool, make sure that you are asking these questions and evaluating whether or not that tool really does have a commitment to accessibility or if it’s just giving it lip service.