Tag: culture

Presenters

• Tony Olivero – Humana – @TonyOlivero
• Glenda Sims – DeQue Systems (nee University of Texas) – @goodwitch
• Denis Boudreau – Deque Systems – @dboudreau

Download the presentation:  goo.gl/xHjzM

 

THE HUMANA STORY

• Big insurance company with millions of members
• Medicare plans are their largest business area
• Accessibility is a fundamental right of our members – our legacy systems require some work to be accessible

 

Wanted to get a “dream team” of accessibility experts to help Humana get there.  A key question for them was:  How can we document things in a way that our developers know how to bake accessibility into our development processes, so that our web sites are accessible?  (See what I did there by making the question into an agile story?)

They’ve had a lot of success with getting the word out.

 

Glenda – ACCESSIBILITY TEXAS STYLE

• Current Texas State Law = 508 (almost – instead of letters, they use numbers.  Also, captioning is “on request”)
• University of Texas #a11y = 508 (after 508, then moving toward WCAG)
• Did not create a lot of documentation initially
• When working for Deque, she found that most of her financial customers wanted to have documented guidelines.  Consistency in application of guidelines is important, but there isn’t a single monolithic place where you can go to get “THE ANSWER.”
• Settling on how the organization does WCAG2.0, but creation of custom a11y guides.  Pearson, Penn State, and UT have one, for example.

 

Denis – WCAG 2.0 IN THE FIELD

• Often, guidelines are viewed as not adequate for their organizations’ needs (“One size does not fit all”)
• How can an organization managing multiple web development teams over as many development projects make their entire web presence consistently accessible, when no one agrees on what must be done, and how?
• WCAG 2.0 leads to various interpretations…when reading it without context, it doesn’t necessarily make sense.

 

REINVENTING THE ACCESSIBILITY WHEEL

• Re-read WCAG2 guidelines, felt that he needed to analyze what it actually meant.
• Created a “WCAG2 filter” to develop a contextual interpretation of WCAG2 so that people would actually use it.  This filter made communicating with stakeholders much easier.
• Unfortunately, our “filtered” version had a different numbering system than WCAG2, which made mapping issues uncovered by evaluation tools somewhat difficult.

 

ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES BREAKDOWN

• Built a “roles and responsibilities breakdown” document to help each stakeholder understand what their role in the process was.  This fits well into the project management process.
• This has been built into a project on the W3.org web site: http://www.w3.org/community/wai-engage/wiki/Accessibility_Responsibility_Breakdown

 

NORMATIVE AND INFORMATIVE PARTS OF WCAG2.0

• It’s a guideline, not a requirement

 

HAUS – HUMANA ACCESSIBILITY AND USABILITY STANDARD

• This is Humana’s interpretation of WCAG2 standard, documented as described above.
• Example:  SC 1.4.1 – Use of Color:  color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.  (Level A)
• HAUS 4.1 – Use of Color (went through the 4 rules that Humana uses internally to interpret SC 1.4.1).