Ensuring our products are web accessible is all about the learner experience. We never know exactly who our customers’ learners will be, so we want to make sure everyone has the ability to navigate their training, regardless of how they use a browser.
While we’ve partnered with customers in the past to meet Section 508 requirements, we realized it was time to make our stance more transparent and accessible. Part of what made that quite apparent to us was the wave of VPAT requests we were receiving from customers. State laws such as Colorado’s HB21-110 and updates to Title II of the ADA mandate accessibility compliance for many of our customers. To help our customers better navigate these requirements, the good folks on our QA team completed a formal VPAT for our core products. This provides the information our customers need to know where we stand on accessibility conformance.
What is a VPAT?
VPAT stands for Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. It’s a standardized document used to evaluate a product’s accessibility for people with disabilities. It helps organizations and users understand a product’s accessibility without having to audit it themselves.
We got our VPAT template from https://www.itic.org/policy/accessibility/vpat and used the Revised Section 508 format. Section 508 is the US Federal accessibility standard. The Revised Section 508 format indicates how well we meet both Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), which is also included in the VPAT.
What are we doing with them?
Since a template already exists for these documents, we’ve tasked our QA team with going through our products and rating our learners’ experiences in them according to Section 508 requirements and WCAG 2.0 guidelines. We’ve done this for our Rustici Engine, Content Controller and SCORM Cloud products at the time of this writing.
This accessibility report covers the learner experience in the Player. It evaluates any of the buttons, frames, or other elements that wrap around a customer’s packaged content. It also includes elements that come with our media player for PDF, MP3, and MP4 content. It’s worth noting that the accessibility of the packaged content, such as SCORM 1.2 packages, is up to the authoring tool that creates it.
On Content Controller, this also includes the Language Selection page that learners might see when launching an Equivalent, along with the Language Selection frame that can appear in the Player for learners.
We use a few different tools, for example, the WAVE browser extension and Google Chrome’s Lighthouse, to assist with evaluating web pages for accessibility within the browser. We also use screen readers like Mac’s VoiceOver to help with understanding how well navigation through a page works. LLMs, like Google Gemini, serve as a second set of eyes, double-checking our interpretation of the standards and whether we are meeting them well enough.
Where can you find them?
Transparency is key to our process. You can access the specific reports for our core products below:
- Rustici Engine: The completed VPAT can be found alongside our Engine user documentation.
- Content Controller: The report is available in our Content Controller support docs.
- SCORM Cloud: This ACR just recently entered our SCORM Cloud Knowledge Base.
We’re doing our best to keep these documents updated as new major releases come out to reflect the current state of the application.
Fun Fact: While we hear folks typically refer to these documents as VPATs, when they are completed, they go by another name, ACR (Accessibility Conformance Report).
What’s next with these?
We are also working on updating our existing reports to include WCAG 2.2 guidelines, in addition to the existing 2.0 guidelines, and Section 508. WCAG 2.2 is the most recent version of guidelines that are recommended by the W3C.
Once we’ve completed our testing, we will share the results as part of our documentation. We view our accessibility reports as living documentation and will continue to keep our VPAT reports updated as part of our major release processes. We are seeing stricter regulations around accessibility compliance, and we want to make it as simple as possible to demonstrate high accessibility of our products. And if you have any questions about the accessibility conformance of our products, just reach out.
