Four small liberal arts colleges in Western Massachusetts are working together to develop and implement parallel and collaborative campus-wide IT accessibility solutions. This four college initiative has included the development of a homegrown open source Web accessibility testing Web app (“Accessibility Evaluation Tool”) at Hampshire College that utilizes the WebAIM WAVE API. The tool is being implemented by Web Accessibility Committees at each of the four campuses to help evaluate and remediate accessibility of Web sites, and to also provide some Web accessibility training to campus community members. In this session we’ll have a look at the tool in action, and discuss some successes, challenges, and lessons learned during the implementation of an automated Web accessibility testing tool at Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges.

Notes

• 2010 Dear Colleague letter from DOJ
• Old accomidation model doesn’t always work in online courses.
• 2011 Penn State Agreement (fist one)
  • 360 web access complaints by 2017
  • 199 cases opened by DOJ
• Tool: WAVE
  • Does cost. 100 free credits.
  • Quarterly scans of top 100 urls