In 2014, most Canadian businesses will face significant challenges as government regulations go into effect, requiring websites to be accessible to users with disabilities. Are your project teams knowledgeable about the technical accessibility standards? Is your business ready to comply with the regulations? Dan Shire and David Best review the key principles of web accessibility (WCAG 2.0) and the government regulations (including Ontario’s AODA) that your organization must meet. Dan provides specific guidance on planning and executing effective accessibility testing and for building your test team skills. David demonstrates testing tools and techniques, including the use of assistive technology including the JAWS screen reader. Together, they will review IBM’s practical experiences: focusing your testing efforts on the most critical standards, selecting your testing tools, building and training your test teams, and prioritizing the results of your accessibility testing to achieve the maximum benefits for the business while minimizing cost and schedule impacts to the project.

1. Integrating Canadian Accessibility Standards into
your Projects
David Best & Dan Shire
IBM Canada
April 2013 V 0.4
© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

2. Our agenda
Introduction
Obligations &
opportunities
Accessibility & the
project life cycle
Resources
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

3. Introduction
Accessibility:
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• Making technology usable by the greatest number of
people, regardless of age or ability
• Breaking down technical and organizational barriers that
hinder the full participation and contribution of:
– Our customers
– Our employees
– Our family members
– Ourselves
• Individuals have unique requirements and may use
assistive technology to help them overcome specific
barriers in order to access information and services:
– Vision
– Hearing
– Mobility
– Dexterity
– Learning/cognitive
© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

4. Canadians with disabilities increase with age
0-14 years
15-24 years
25-44 years
45-64 years
Population with a
disability by age (2006)
3.7%
4.9 million Canadians
4.7%
8%
18.3%
33%
65-74 years
56.3%
75+years
All ages
14.3%
Source: Statistics Canada. Participation and Activity Limitation Survey 2006:
Tables. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2007 (Cat. No. 89-628-XIE - No. 003).
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

5. Introducing AODA Standards
Ontario’s AODA – Accessibility for Ontarians with
Disabilities Act
• World leadership
• Public and private sector
• Specific requirements – timelines and measurable
• A consultative process
• 5 components
–
–
–
–
–
5
Customer Service
Information and Communication
Transportation
Employment
Built Environment
• All public sector organizations in Ontario are under the AODA
• 360,000 private sector businesses (provincially regulated)
• 20,000 private sector businesses (>50 employees) have
additional obligations under the regulations
© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

6. Obligations – legal and regulatory requirements
Province of Ontario
• The province requires public sector organizations (province, municipal,
colleges, universities, hospitals, etc) to provide accessible customer
service and accessible web sites.
• The requirement for accessible information - web, content, other
communication - under the AODA.
Government of Canada
• The federal government was sued and convicted because citizen-facing
web sites were not fully accessible.
Business in Canada
• Larger companies in Ontario (> 50 employees) fall under more stringent
Ontario regulations – external web sites and internal IT systems must
meet WCAG 2.0 accessibility requirements.
• 360,000 businesses in Ontario are affected by the provincial regulations.
– US and international standards are often a factor
Business in the United States
• Federal contracts are obligated by S508.
• Federal, state and local by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
• Businesses are obligated by the ADA
• Risk mitigation influences many companies
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

7. Opportunity – the case for accessibility
Being accessible makes good business sense — it helps your organization gain a
competitive advantage in growing markets, increase revenue and retain employees.
People with
Disabilities
16% of world
population
Aging
By 2025, 20% of
industrialized world
population will be
over age 65
Canadian population:
Canadians with disabilities:
Non-native
language
speakers
Globalization
the driver
People with
low literacy &
novice ICT users
Rising tide of new
users
Everyday
situations
“Temporarily
disabled”
Driving – eyes busy
Noisy environment
35 Million
~ 5 Million
Accessibility extends the capabilities of technology to accelerate social innovation
and create shared value for all the citizens of our Smarter Planet.
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

8. Opportunity – the case for accessibility
Source: Ontario Accessibility Directorate, 2012
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http://www.mcss.gov.on.ca/documents/en/mcss/accessibility/Ont_InfoGraph-EN.pdf
© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

9. Timelines for AODA
AODA Compliance Timeline Simplified Summary
Obligated
organization
New content
on existing
Customer
facing sites
New
Customerfacing sites
All Customer
facing sites
and content
(legacy sites
& content)
Private Sector with >
50 employees
(20,000 businesses
in Ontario)
WCAG 2.0 A
Jan. 1, 2012
WCAG 2.0 A
Jan. 1, 2014
WCAG 2.0 AA
Jan. 1, 2021 **
2013 – 2017
WCAG 2.0 A
Jan. 1, 2014
WCAG 2.0 AA
Jan. 1, 2021 **
2013 - 2017
WCAG 2.0 AA
Jan. 1, 2012 **
WCAG 2.0 AA
Jan. 1, 2016 **
Municipalities and
other public
sector (universities,
Customer &
Citizen facing
sites, and
Employee
sites
Employment –
accommodation
plans & accessible
formats and
communication
supports
hospitals, schools…)
Government of
Ontario
WCAG 2.0 AA
Jan. 1, 2012
WCAG 2.0 AA
Jan. 1, 2020
2013 - 2017
** Except 1.2.4 Live captions and 1.2.5 Pre-recorded audio descriptions.
Not intended to be a legal opinion – consult the regulations and your organization’s legal counsel for specifics.
http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/source/regs/english/2011/elaws_src_regs_r11191_e.htm
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

10. The consequences of not being accessible
• Organizations are exposed to the threat and cost of litigation,
public relations issues, and loss of government contracts.
– Private companies, such as Priceline, Ramada, and Target have
been sued for not having accessible Web sites and the
organizations were forced to pay hefty fines and agree to re-design
their sites to make them more accessible.
– Designing for accessibility from the beginning is significantly less
expensive than re-design after the fact, especially under courtmandated pressure.
– In Canada: VIA Rail, the Government of Canada and the Toronto
Transit Commission (TTC) have been charged and convicted
• Most government entities in the U.S., Europe, Australia, New
Zealand and Japan are required to comply with some form of
accessibility standards and regulations.
• Procurement challenges - for private sector clients that supply
services & products to the government, overlooking
accessibility requirements can result in lost contracts and lost
revenue, or penalties.
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

11. I/T project life cycle (a simplified view!)
Here’s a “generic project model”.
You can unwind this to get a
traditional waterfall project or
compress the timeframe to get an
agile project iteration cycle.
Initiation &
Requirements
Design
Deploy/
support
Users
Test
User experience, including
accessibility and support for
universal design, should be at the
heart of your project – this can be
integrated into every phase of the
project.
Build
Next, we’ll look at the benefits,
implications, roles and skills for
each of these project stages.
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

12. Project Initiation and Requirements Definition
Foundations for your project:
• Standards & regulations
• We’ll cover these on the next slide
•
•
•
•
•
•
Organizational Governance
Project methodology
Training and Experience
• Specific to team roles
Technology
• Development and testing
Tools
Procurement policy
• Your success is dependant on your
vendors, suppliers and partners –
test them!
Who’s involved:
•
Project sponsor
•
Solution architect
•
Business analysts
•
Project manager
Work products:
•
Business case
•
Solution architecture
•
High level functional and
non-functional requirements
•
Use cases
•
Personas
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

13. Standards – WCAG 2.0 Level A & AA for the web
WCAG 2.0 Level A – 25 guidelines to meet basic accessibility
WCAG 2.0 Level AA – 13 additional guidelines provide more robust support
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Perceivable
• Provide text alternatives for non-text content.
• Provide captions and alternatives for audio and video content.
• Make content adaptable; and make it available to assistive technologies – images
with labels.
• Use sufficient contrast to make things easy to see and hear – contrast and colour.
Operable
• Make all functionality keyboard accessible – tabbing order.
• Give users enough time to read and use content.
• Do not use content that causes seizures (flashing).
• Help users navigate and find content.
Understandable
• Make text readable and understandable – clear language
• Make content appear and operate in predictable ways – headings, structure.
• Help users avoid and correct mistakes.
Robust
• Maximize compatibility with current and future technologies.
© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

14. Design
Who’s involved:
• User experience specialist
• Accessibility specialist
• Information architect
• Graphic designer
• User focus groups
• Developers with code design experience
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Work products:
• Creative design
• The look and feel of the application, including branding.
• Wire frames
• Include components that describe the required user interface (mouse, keyboard,
touch screen, speech, etc.) and interaction with user agents.
• This may involve user group studies to gain an understanding of adaptive
technologies and user behaviour.
• Responsive design – gracefully support multiple devices from traditional PC to
smart phones
• Web page functional components must meet user expectations.
• The page landscape must be perceivable, the content understandable, the objects
operable, and the overall usability must be robust.
© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

15. Build
Who’s involved:
• Developers
• With accessibility training and tools
• Accessibility Compliance Expert
• Responsible for planning, coordinating and monitoring the accessibility
testing throughout the development process
• Requires an understanding of the compliance certification procedures,
available automated testing tools, and usability testing requirements. An
integrated testing strategy for accessibility is critical during development.
Work products:
• Functional code
• Robust code which has been built and unit tested with tools that enforce
(or at a minimum enable support for) the WCAG 2.0 guidelines
• Accessibility test plan/strategy
• There are 3 typical elements to accessibility testing: automated testing to
identify basic issues, manual testing using specialized tools (e.g. browser
plug-ins), and selective testing using assistive technology such as
ZoomText and JAWS.
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

16. Test – Functional testing
Who’s involved:
• Development team
• Accessibility Compliance Expert
• Due to the dynamic construction of complex web sites it is necessary
to repeat accessibility compliance testing at all levels of development
(Alpha, Beta, Production).
• Dynamic page rendering and operable functionality must be thoroughly
tested before usability testing begins. Where native HTML5 cannot
meet accessibility requirements, then WAI-ARIA coding can be
implemented. Java scripts and widgets (JQuery, Dojo) must be robust.
• Test the application, and the documentation
Work products:
• Functional, accessible application code
• Tested: automated, manual and assistive technology techniques
• Test report
• Accessibility issues documented & tracked
• Remediation steps identified
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

17. Test – Usability testing
Who’s involved:
• Selected end users
• The more accessible the product, the fewer the remediation cycles are likely
to be needed in the future.
• User experience testing is performed by end-user adaptive technology users.
• This may include users from the various disability groups (vision, hearing,
cognitive, mobility).
• If the functional compliance testing and required remediation implementation
is not performed properly, the end user experience testing will be frustrating
and costly.
• To be effective the usability test phase must be conducted with well defined
user experience test scripts – don’t “wing it”.
• User experience specialist & Accessibility Compliance Expert
Work products:
• Usability test report
• User experience and accessibility issues identified, documented & tracked
• Remediation steps identified
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

18. Accessibility testing – rating the issues
Accessibility Severity Guidelines
Sev. 1 – Critical - Must fix to allow even the most basic use of the application.
User with a disability cannot complete a task, and no alternate means is provided
to complete that task. The issue is a violation of the Web Accessibility Checklist.
Sev. 2 – High - Must fix in order to meet accessibility standards and allow full use of the
system.
User with a disability will likely not be able to easily complete a task, and no
alternate means is provided to complete the task. The issue is a violation of the Web
Accessibility Checklist.
Sev. 3 – Medium - Should fix to allow productive, accessible use of the application.
User with a disability will likely be able to complete a task, but the issue prevents
the user from completing the task efficiently. The issue may or may not be a violation of
the Web Accessibility Checklist.
Sev. 4 – Low - Should be addressed in next release.
User with a disability will be able to complete a task, but the issue may cause confusion
to the user, and should be resolved. The issue is not a violation of the Web Accessibility
Checklist. An issue was found, but should not be classified as an accessibility problem.
These may be functionality bugs that should be corrected.
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

19. Deploy, support & documentation
Who’s involved:
• Technical writer/editor
• Help desk (support team)
• Accessibility consultant
• User experience specialist & Accessibility Compliance Expert
Work products:
• Training and guidance for the help desk – supporting customers or employees who
use assistive technology
• When the application or product is released into production, there should be a
feedback mechanism to continue evaluating the user experience. The many
different browsers, user agents, and version levels, will render a wide variety
of user experience results. This feedback will help improve the robustness of
your product in later releases.
• Support costs can be significant, there may be customer satisfaction or legal
risks associated with inappropriate application support
• Under the AODA, there are obligations and penalties for customer support.
• Accessible documentation
• Compliant with the WCAG 2.0 standards – MS Office, PDF, captioned video,
etc.
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

20. Training, training and more training
WCAG 2.0
•
•
•
•
38 A & AA requirements (‘success criteria’) – each with techniques
www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref
www.ibm.com/able
www.ontario.ca/AccessON
Everyone on the team needs some training
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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Project stakeholders
Project manager
Business analysts
User eXperience specialist (UX) & Information architects
Web Designers
Software developers
Quality assurance experts
Accessibility Compliance Expert
Technical writers (application documentation)
The first couple projects will cost more – there’s a training, tools and organizational
learning curve. You cannot avoid this investment.
The cost of remediation is much higher than the investment to design it and build it right
up front.
© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

21. Technology challenges
Explosive growth of mobile delivery of I/T solutions
• WCAG 2.0 does not deliver a complete picture for tablets and smart
phones
• Most mobile devices will not have a traditional keyboard but that doesn’t
mean they cannot be accessible
• Most mobile applications are hybrid applications and not simply Web
• Mobile platforms are incomplete in their accessibility services support
Social media
• Despite rapid adoption rates, social media channels are still largely
inaccessible…
• Social businesses will perpetuate and widen this gap unless inclusive
solutions are provided
Growth of big data and analytics
• I/T solutions increasingly requires the effective use of business analytics
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• This is an area where the accessibility technology community has done a
poor job – representation of complex data and inter-relationships of the
data in a way that is clear and understandable, and which is accessible
with assistive technologies
© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

22. Important success factors
Start your journey on the right foot:
•
Adopt proven standards
• WCAG 2.0, with ARIA extensions
• On-going training for developers and
testers
• On-going awareness sessions for the
project sponsor and other stakeholders
to maintain support
• Align with good user experience
principles
•
Organizational Support: Executive Champion
•
Governance - Legal, procurement
accessibility clause in contracts and RFP’s
•
Work with groups such as HR with a
heightened and focused awareness of
disability issues
•
Pick your first project carefully
• Work with groups involved in highly
visible customer facing applications
• But, don’t overreach – don’t try to boil
the ocean on the first project
• Identify and get commitment on the
accessibility requirements at the earliest
possible stage - in the conceptual and
business case process
•
•
•
•
•
Development environment
• Consider a dedicated Portal for sharing
and distribution of information,
resources and downloadable testing
tools
• Integrate your accessibility testing tools
with development and standard testing
tools and processes
Testing environment
• Controlled and structured – all the
testing disciplines and techniques you
understand can be applied to improve
your odds of success
Be innovative and thought provoking
Create repeatable and scalable solutions
Embrace collaboration – between industry
and vendors and colleagues
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

23. Questions?
Please contact Dan or David:
Dan Shire
IBM Canada
danshire@ca.ibm.com
David Best
IBM Canada
DaveBest@ca.ibm.com
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

24. More information – check out these references


Government of Ontario
IBM accessibility checklists



WCAG 2.0 guidelines
www.w3.org/WAI
W3C – good & bad website examples
www.w3.org/WAI/demos/bad/
Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) page on user testing
www.ontario.ca/AccessON
www.ibm.com/able
webbism.com/2012/07/06/the-benefits-of-user-testing-with-disabled-users/www.w3.o






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WCAG sufficient techniques
www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/intro.html#introduction-layerstechs-head
Involving Users in Evaluating Web Accessibility
www.w3.org/WAI/eval/users
Involving Users in Web Projects for Better, Easier Accessibility
www.w3.org/WAI/users/involving.html
WebAIM Utah State University
www.webaim.org
OCAD University – Inclusive Design
www.idrc.ocad.ca
Government of Canada Web Experience Toolkit
www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/ws-nw/wa-aw/wet-boew/index-eng.asp
© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.

25. Cool tools …
1. Plug-ins for Firefox:
 Fangs – screen reader simulator

WAVE – testing toolbar (from WebAIM)
1. NVDA – free open source screen reader
www.nvda-project.org
1. JAWS – screen reader – evaluation copy
www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp
1. IBM aDesigner – free open source accessibility simulator and test tool
www.eclipse.org/actf/downloads/tools/aDesigner
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© 2013 IBM Canada Ltd.