University of Massachusetts - Boston

The Business Problem

The University of Massachusetts-Boston (UMass Boston) is the second largest campus in the five-campus UMass system, serving about 13,500 students, all commuters. Their main Web site receives about 30,000 hits per day with thousands of students taking online classes. It's difficult to quantify exactly how many across all of the disciplines. At a minimum, 15,000 faculty, staff members, and students access online materials each day. In addition to more than 100 academic programs, the school also has a number of centers and institutes. Several of their programs and institutes focus on issues of education and accessibility.

Although the UMass system has not implemented a formal policy on Web accessibility, UMass Boston has taken a proactive approach to addressing Web accessibility at their school. Driven mostly at the grassroots level by faculty and staff, the University has sought to develop the tools and policy for increasing the overall quality (usability and accessibility) of campus Web sites. The movement toward a learning management system was a primary catalyst in this effort.

The initial goal of the accessibility initiative at UMass Boston is education. “Given the campus' mission of making education accessible to all, we should be a leader,” said Joe Peters, UMass Boston Webmaster. “Initially our focus has been on faculty Web sites, which by policy are "unofficial" sites and thus the university does not review or repair them. Still we recognize that our policy may be incongruous to reality; because these sites are central to our mission, we cannot ignore them.”

One of the first items needed to move this project forward was a tool or set of tools for verifying the current compliance levels with accessibility guidelines. UMass Boston selected HiSoftware’s AccMonitor and AccVerify products to meet this need. “The reporting and the flexibility of HiSoftware’s solutions make them easy to build around. We're still developing our process, but we feel the reporting is the most important step at this time. We're not as focused on automated repair as our goal is more to educate developers and faculty.” Joe Peters, UMass Boston Webmaster.

The Solution

UMass Boston purchased AccVerify and AccRepair from HiSoftware along with AccMonitor Server. AccVerify provides for the verification of accessibility policy and standards required for Web sites under the Rehabilitation Act Section 508 and W3C® 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.

AccMonitor is an automated accessibility testing solution for Web sites or for use in conjunction with Intranet Servers or File Servers. Using a crawler, AccMonitor tests sites for compliance with Section 508 and W3C accessibility standards. AccMonitor spiders, or crawls over, entire Web sites and reports on their accessibility status. AccMonitor particularly benefits organizations that need to monitor multiple servers that host information via the World Wide Web. AccMonitor is a server solution that is designed to run with no user interaction once configured. AccMonitor can be scheduled to crawl Web sites daily, weekly, or monthly. It also allows users to log-on for on demand reports on the accessibility status of their Web pages.

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, and also provided the flexibility for Enterprise Wide deployment and mass distribution.

The Bottom Line

The University did a careful and comprehensive analysis of the leading accessibility testing tools on the market, before choosing HiSoftware’s solutions. According to Peters, “While there are good tools out there, many are very focused and not designed for a multi-user/developer environment. The HiSoftware suite seemed much more inline with our environment where we have many different sites and developers. We needed a few different reporting options plus the ability to customize; we didn't want to have to implement three different tools to cover the range of what we wanted. The customizability of the tool is what helped sell us on the product. "

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