Case Study
Commonwealth of Kentucky Office of Technology (COT)
The Business Problem
The Commonwealth Office of Technology (COT) for the Commonwealth of Kentucky offers
enterprise-wide IT leadership and services to Kentucky state government agencies.
Infrastructure, security, development, policies, training and project management
are just some these services.
COT develops and maintains numerous web applications for state agencies. COT also
is on the forefront of Accessibility in Kentucky: defining standards, raising awareness,
correcting problems and training other agencies. Recently, COT in conjunction with
the Web Standards Committee has created a final version of the 7025 Accessibility
for Internet/World Wide Web Design and Publishing. Once
the Enterprise Architecture and Standards Committee reconvenes, the final version
will be submitted for adoption.
The 7025 Accessibility Standard requires all pages to meet Section 508 of the Federal
Rehabilitation Act and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative
(WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 Conformance Level Double-A.
However, the 7025 standard is nothing new. This level of Accessibility required
of all Executive branch state agencies has been in place since 2002, with references
to Accessibility requirements going back to 2000. This latest version is an attempt
to separate and clarify the Accessibility standard from Kentucky's Design standard.
One of the first priorities of the COT was to develop a strategy for managing and
monitoring the accessibility status of Kentucky Web sites, administered by hundreds
of Web managers. Needed was a tool or set of tools for verifying the current compliance
levels with Section 508 and a tool to allow web developers to check their own work.
They chose HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff and AccVerify/AccRepair products to meet
this need.
The Solution
COT purchased an unlimited license for Compliance Sheriff and has begun a rollout
of AccVerify/AccRepair at several of its installations. AccVerify provides for the
verification of accessibility policy and standards required for Web Sites under
the Rehabilitation Act Section 508 and W3C® WCAG 1.0 Priority 1-3 guidelines. 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. These applications
are available as a stand-alone desktop solution and as an integrated add-on for
Microsoft FrontPage.
Compliance Sheriff is an automated accessibility testing solution for Web sites or for use
in conjunction with intranet servers or file servers. Using a crawler, Compliance Sheriff
tests sites for compliance with Section 508 and W3C accessibility standards. Compliance Sheriff
spiders, or crawls over, entire Web sites and reports on their accessibility status.
Compliance Sheriff particularly benefits organizations that need to monitor multiple servers
that host information via the World Wide Web. Compliance Sheriff is a server solution that
is designed to run with no user interaction once configured. Compliance Sheriff 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.
The Bottom Line
HiSoftware’s solutions provided the comprehensive testing and reporting features
that COT required, through a simple to use interface. Additionally, HiSoftware’s
applications provided great flexibility in user-driven and automated reporting,
and also provided flexibility for Enterprise Wide deployment and mass distribution.
COT uses HiSoftware solutions to monitor compliance with the 7025 Accessibility
standard. Severs errors are prioritized for repair, and egregious sites do not go
live. Since COT uses the software to audit numerous sites for compliance, the numbers
of users that access these sites are not known. It is certainly quite a few.
“Tools like HiSoftware's Compliance Sheriff, AccVerify and AccRepair provide Kentucky
with an unambiguous, consistent process of checking for Accessibility. While there
are still a number of Accessibility points that still need to be judged by a person,
automated tools carry the majority of the load,” said Mark Darbyshire, IT Systems
Engineer, Division of Centers of Expertise, Web Development Group, Commonwealth
Office of Technology.