Page Content

Triage is a process being developed by the TLT Web Accessibility Team (the ATeam) to bring a website to an acceptable, if not perfect, level of compliance with current standards (WCAG 2.0 comformance level AA) – quickly.

Audit

  1. Document all websites that you or your unit are responsible for maintaining
  2. Collect web analytics reports and data

Select

  1. Select the most popular sites based on volume (i.e., visits in the analytics report).
  2. For each site, select the 10 to 20 most popular pages based on volume.
  3. Include the home page.
  4. Include pages with known blockers (e.g., unlabeled form fields, videos without captions)

It is also important to select web pages and web applications that are business or mission critical for Penn State. These are determined based on certain characteristics, such as:

  • Pages that have the highest volume of visitors
  • Pages that everyone in a stakeholder group must visit at least once in their Penn State career (e.g. Intent-to-Graduate, Job Application)
  • Critical pages (e.g. Course Selection, Paying Tuition)
  • Informational pages that support the critical pages (e.g. pages that describe how to pay tuition)
  • Pages that have multiple form fields, structure elements, tables, images, or if it has a complex menu structure

It is important to understand that triage is an iterative process; when the initial set of selected pages is complete, the criteria for selecting the next set of pages will change. For example, select next the next most-popular pages, or target an audience of color blind users and examine colors and contrast used in pages in that context.

Test

Test selected pages with these tools:

  1. Validators: machine test of standards-based accessibility. Note that validators can only test for standards compliance and limited machine-testable accessibility issues; they cannot guarantee accessibility.
  2. Screen readers: provide a more complete test for accessibility, including usability. It is strongly recommended that one or more web developers and designers, or content experts, learn to effectively use a screen reader for accessibility testing.
  3. Code review: some testers will find reviewing the code of pages with forms or tables to be more efficient.

Fix

Our Blockers page has a comprehensive list of things to fix, which are separated into categories. This is a good place to start when looking to fix a site.

The importance of each blocker is dependent on the site being fixed. Video captions are more important for sites that have a lot of videos, form labels are more important for sites that have a lot of forms, etc.

Course Triage

In addition to websites, it is also important for courses to be accessible. More information on making courses accessible can be found on the Course Triage page.

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