2004 Conference Proceedings
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25-MILLION WEB PAGE Section 508 COMPLIANCE PROJECT: LESSONS LEARNED, TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS, AND RESULTS
Presenter
Matt King
Accessibility End User Advocate, Office of the CIO, IBM Corporation
90 South Cascade Avenue, Suite 800
Colorado Springs, CO 80903
Voice: (719) 520-3006
E-mail: mattking@us.ibm.com
1 Introduction
Many organizations are now committed to achieving and maintaining an accessible web presence. These organizations have accepted a business case and have been executing an implementation plan, with widely varying levels of success. It is clear that the larger or more decentralized the enterprise, the more challenging it is to develop an effective, affordable, and sustainable implementation plan. Consider government agencies where accessibility is mandated and implementation plans have been in progress for more than two years. Only 22% of federal sites meet section 508 requirements ([1] West).
After three years experience managing what may be the world's single largest web accessibility commitment, encompassing 25-million internal and external IBM web pages, IBM's CIO office has learned much about what is required for a successful section 508 web presence implementation in a large, decentralized, geographically diverse, and/or professionally diverse enterprise. IBM and its web presence have some degree of all these characteristics, each of which introduces complexities to the development and execution of a compliance plan. This paper discusses the nature of those challenges and what IBM is finding as most effective means of addressing them.
2 The Basics of a Section 508 Implementation Plan
Consider the basic steps of a web accessibility implementation plan as outlined by the W3C WAI [2]:
1. Establish responsibilities
2. Conduct initial assessment
3. Develop organizational policy
4. Select software
5. Provide training
6. Develop accessible web site
7. Promote organizational awareness
8. Monitor web site accessibility
3 The Complexities Introduced by Size or Diversity
Each of the above implementation steps can become a major, and potentially expensive, project in a large or diverse enterprise. Some challenges are introduced purely by size of a web presence. Others can be introduced to even a modestly sized web presence by the geographical diversity or professional diversity of an organization. Examples of challenges are:
1. Responsibilities for web application development and deployment, web content development, web content promotion, content management, content standards, and other related responsibilities may belong to different divisions, people with a variety of levels or types of professional or technical skills, people in diverse geographies, etc.
2. An initial assessment may require a significant effort to simply define the web space and locate the content to be analyzed. Once the true size of the project is determined, the business case may need additional support to maintain management commitment.
3. Organizational policies may need to be tailored to various country laws or continuously reviewed to ensure consistency with the constantly changing international legal environment.
4. Software that is appropriate for web content development by marketing, financial, legal, or medical professionals may not be appropriate for the needs of technical professionals and vice versa.
5. Management will justifiably resist specialized training of non-I/T professionals in the implementation of technical standards. Yet, it is essential that non-I/T professionals publish web content.
6. There may be hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of web servers, each of which may be hosting multiple sites or applications, spread around the globe. Identifying the ownership of these sites in itself, let alone making them accessible, may be a major project.
7. It may take years of constant communications and training to create awareness of accessibility standards in the clamber of awareness efforts of every other type.
8. Monitoring could be prohibitively expensive or slow if not adequately designed to match the size, management structure, and reporting needs of the organization.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. Yet any one of the above could drive a web content standards compliance project of any type to utter failure due to cost overruns, organizational resistance, or simple lack of effectiveness.
4 Initial Steps to Mitigate Complexities
In a large organization, the cycles of simplifying processes are never-ending. In this section we will discuss IBM's proven approaches to mitigating the effects of scaling up enterprise size on four of the first seven implementation steps listed in section 2 above. The Following sections will address how some of the other consequences of large scale can be addressed via a monitoring or audit system.
1. Where responsibilities for different processes that effect web accessibility are spread across a division or business unit from I/T departments to communications departments, generate management scorecards on accessibility standards compliance to reflect the performance of a complete business unit, enabling the business unit executive to both manage and be held accountable for compliance.
2. Use the initial assessment process as a beta process for developing an on-going monitoring process. Thus, consider all the factors discussed in the following sections as choices for assessment methods and technologies are made.
3. Limit the scope of the project by aligning the effort with business priorities. For example, IBM first targeted high profile external web sites, limiting the scope to less than 1 million pages. Eventually all customer-facing sites were included. As the project has progressed, internal sites have been added. In addition, IBM divided errors by effect and prioritized sites based on the number of priority one errors. Other common choices for prioritization may be based on site traffic, target audience, etc. Align scope limits with easily identifiable business priorities or already available measurements to avoid adding cost or complexity to the project.
4. It will most likely simplify the project to have a single set of standards that is the union of the essential needs of all geographies.
5 The measurement system
Management systems of any size necessarily rely on metrics to support decision-making. For this reason, a useful, efficient, and reliable monitoring system is one of the most crucial aspects of a sustainable and effective web standards compliance effort. The attributes of the monitoring system that make it adequate may vary significantly from organization to organization depending on factors originating from questions such as:
- How centralized is the management of compliance?
- How are other aspects of the enterprise web application portfolio managed?
- What organizational factors influence how compliance data should be distributed and acted upon?
- How is the compliance project itself measured and funded?
Answers to each of these questions need to be considered as the principal aspects of a monitoring system are designed. Following sections will show how such answers have influenced the design of IBM's monitoring system.
The W3C WAI suggests the following provisions should be included in a monitoring system to ensure persistent accessibility [3]:
1. Clear statement of expected conformance level and scope of Web sites to which it applies.
2. Clearly identified individuals responsible for monitoring the site, and follow-up procedures they can use to rapidly bring non-conformant pages into conformance;
3. Clear expectations with regard to frequency, method, and scope of evaluations;
4. Processes for validating and evaluating all new types of pages before they are added to the site;
5. Software to facilitate evaluation
6. Incorporation in Web site of address for feedback on accessibility of site.
6 Designing a Compliance Management System for IBM
6.1 Business Processes
As an I/T company, IBM's own I/T business processes and environment are under constant transformation to both exploit and showcase IBM's abilities. To enable higher degrees of horizontal integration to support IBM's on demand strategy, IBM has expanded and improved central repositories of information on web applications that are developed and managed by all business units. This has enabled IBM to have a centralized web standards monitoring process that provides scorecard data to each business unit as well as an overall role-up of data for all of IBM. Each business unit executive has a representative on a company-wide team that is working to drive compliance consistently across the company.
6.2 Technical requirements
In this portion of the presentation, we will discuss what requirements beyond the essentials of performance, reliability, and scalability are important to process efficiency and effectiveness as well as containing cost.
6.3 Technical Innovations
In this section we will discuss some of IBM's technical innovations that are helping IBM meet the above requirements.
6.4 Technical Solution Architecture
Here we will survey the resulting process architecture for IBM's compliance measurement system.
7 References
[1] "State and Federal E-Government in the United States, 2003" By Darrell M. West,
Brown University (401-863-1163)
Email:Darrell_West@brown.edu
Web: http://www.insidepolitics.org/egovt03us.html
[2] "Implementation Plan for Web Accessibility"
Web:http://www.w3.org/WAI/impl
11 October 2002, Copyright (c) World Wide Web Consortium,
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University).
[3] "Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility"
Web:http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/bcase/rev.html
15 November 2002, Copyright (c) World Wide Web Consortium,
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University).
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