The Business Problem
California State University, Bakersfield
(CSUB) is an educational facility that serves a student population of
nearly 8,000 as of the fall 2003 quarter. The CSUB Web server hosts
over 200 departmental and organizational Web sites in addition to the
individual sites for faculty, staff, and administrators. The majority
of these Web sites provide course information essential to the
students and faculty.
Currently, the CSUB Web system is complying with the California State
law that requires them to meet the ADA Section 508 standards. With the
help of the Provost’s Academic Technology Committee (ATC), CSUB is
striving towards making all but faculty Web sites accessible. The ATC
committee consists of the Provost, Deans, Librarians, faculty, and
Directors of IT departments within CSUB. The ATC, under the guidance
of the Provost, has established a policy on ADA compliancy that states
that any school, department, or other campus constituent who
established a Web site that bears the CSUB name or logo must be in
compliance with Section 508 guidelines and will be subject to
monitoring of their Web site on a bi-monthly basis to ensure that it
remains in compliance.
In order to reach this goal CSUB needed an intuitive, cost effective
product that would enable the average Webmaster to easily address Web
site accessibility issues within a short period of time. CSUB selected
HiSoftware’s AccRepair and AccVerify products to meet these needs.
“Without Hi-Software’s AccVerify program we would have been forced to
check pages manually using free services,” said Joan Canfield,
Director of E Learning Services at CSUB. “When we first used
AccVerify, we scanned all campus sites in verification modes to
determine the status of each site, how much help they might need and
whether it was fixable. After scanning each site and the reports were
generated, we found that no site passed. This left us feeling that it
was going to be a difficult and long battle, but with the ease of
AccVerify and the ability to make the necessary changes using
AccRepair, we found that making each campus site accessible did not
take a long time and was easy to do.”
The Solution
CSUB purchased AccVerify and AccRepair
from HiSoftware in order to assist with their Web accessibility goals.
AccVerify provides for the verification of accessibility policy and
standards required for Web sites under the Rehabilitation Act Section
508 and W3CŪ Priority 1 guidelines. As information is added to a Web
site, AccVerify reports on whether all elements are in compliance.
AccRepair uses the reporting and verification components of AccVerify
to launch a repair “wizard” interface, which prompts the user to
correct accessibility errors. AccRepair also uses a library that
“learns” as repairs are made. Corrections of the same error (for
example, associating "alt-text" behind an image) need only be made
once. The library then stores the corrected information and
auto-corrects the images each time a page is encountered with that
image. AccRepair and AccVerify are available as integrated Microsoft
FrontPage applications. Both products are also available as automated
server-based solutions that minimize labor required to achieve and
maintain accessible Web sites as new content is created. HiSoftware’s
solutions provided the comprehensive testing and reporting features
that the University required through a simple to use interface.
Additionally, HiSoftware’s applications provided the greatest
flexibility in user-driven and automated reporting.
The Bottom Line Before the implementation of HiSoftware’s
Solutions, CSUB did not verify accessibility issues on a broad basis.
Individual pages were verified through free online tools, but
verification was left up to the individual Webmasters. According to
Canfield, “The amount of labor required checking pages individually
and then repairing them was prohibitive. AccVerify allowed us to
spread out the work to all Webmasters, repair the errors quickly, and
maintain an accessible server. With over 200 departmental Web sites to
verify our staff would have been swamped without AccVerify.”
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