Accessibility, US federal requirements, VPAT

Our department (Center for Teaching and Learning) at U of Vermont has a small Omeka space that contains exhibits built by students as part of class projects. (Feel free to take a look: http://badger.uvm.edu/omeka/)

The university is planning a campus-wide accessibility review of the current use of technology, web-based tools, and public program information related to learning and instruction and campus communications, programs, and information.

The accessibility review will include examining web-based tools that we support by using the “Voluntary Product Accessibility Template” - the rubric that the federal government uses to ensure that new software products are accessible and will meet the WCAG 2.0 AA standard:
http://www.state.gov/m/irm/impact/126343.htm

While the planning is still in progress for how the review will be done, the question of our Omeka site has come up, especially since it is built by students and so needs to be accessible both to viewers and builders.

I've searched the Forums for accessibility information and have found some information about improvements in 2.3 but would like to know if anyone can point me to a more comprehensive list of accessibility features or if the VPAT template linked above has been considered as a guide to future accessibility features.

I would hate to our growing Omeka exhibits get shut down. These are wonderful opportunities for students to create exhibits and collections based on historic documents and objects.

- Hope

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hope.greenberg@uvm.edu, Center for Teaching and Learning, U of Vermont (UVM)

There are tools which can test web accessibility of a given website for example : http://wave.webaim.org/