Report updated on April 30, 2025.
The Accessibility Compliance Project is in full swing. We will update our status periodically between now and our due date of April 2026.
Product Testing
There are 50 products entered into the Tracker at this time. These 50 products are in various stages of testing and remediation. The compliance review priorities are set for these products:
- Critical - Barriers submitted by impacted end user - 3 products
- Critical - High Usage and Known Compliance Issues - 8 products
- Critical - Vendor is using an accessibility overlay - 2 products
- Medium - Targeted Audience and Known Compliance Issues - 12 products
- Medium - Targeted Audience and Compliance Status Unknown - 17 products
- Low - Usage Varies but No Barriers - 8 products
Out of 50 products in the testing pipeline 46 of them are in active use at the President's Office and/or the campuses.
Out of 50 Products: 38% are completed testing, 16% are in active testing, 12% need updated testing due to changes in the product after previously being tested, and 34% have. not yet been tested.
Issue Tracking for Products
One-hundred eight-three Issues have been identified in the tested product set. Seventy-five percent of the identified issues are considered "blockers" meaning that they present obstacles that prevent individuals, especially those with disabilities, from accessing or interacting with online content effectively. Only 25% of the issues are considered a "weakness," that is, an issue that makes using the online content difficult though perhaps not impossible.
Various remediation status allow us to keep track of where any given issue is in the remediation process. A status of "identified" means that the issue has been found but nothing has yet been done with this information. Seventy-six issues are currently identified only. Another 56 issues have already been submitted to either a vendor or to internal software developers at UMSO who are enabled to remediate the issues. Vendors are working on 12 issues right now. Six have been fixed but not validated and 22 are completely validated as compliant.
The testing that takes place for each product is highly specific to the product based on the intended usage of that product by students, faculty, staff or site visitors. Testing is a manual process with a person at a computer attempting to perform the required actions and then evaluating the performance of the product. Each test must be done multiple times in order to account for all possible ranges of disabilities. We are testing with screen readers (VoiceOver on a Mac, JAWS and NVDA on Windows). We test by navigating with keyboard-only or navigating with VoiceControl, and by activating system accessibility features such as the prefers reduced motion setting and by turning on dark mode. We also employ various browser tools and plugins such as Zoom and Dark Reader.
Videos must be tested manually as well. We try to make sure that all users can identify what video they are going to be playing. We check that they can play and pause a video using whatever assistive technology they require. We check for accurate captions, the need for audio descriptions, color contrast issues, visuals that might effect those with vestibular disorders, and language that could be a barrier as well.
Even with our very extensive testing program, it is impossible to test for every single scenario. We are able to accurately identify issues that will effect the following disability communities. Many issues effect multiple communities at the same time.
The number of issues by disability impacted: Blind (124 issues), Deafblind (104), Colorblind (10), Low Vision (112), Hard of Hearing (3), Mobility (70), and Epilepsy/Vestibular Disorder/Motion Senstivity (8).
Digital or "Web" Content Inventory
All content delivered via a website also must be compliant. Our websites themselves are regularly tested with an excellent web quality tool that alerts us to issues. We review issues regularly and actively fix any core code/template issues. However, when you have multiple web content editors who are empowered to maintain their own content, they can easily forget best practice or accessibility requirements. The quality assurance tool also sends our editors regular reports and helps them find these issues so that they can be fixed quickly and easily.
The biggest area of concern for digital content is content provided VIA the website, not content on the website. The types of content that generally fail accessibility checks are documents such as Word or PDF files, Video or Audio embedded on a site or linked to externally, and forms.
The DX Team has been working with departments to catalog all documents and audio/video content. We have only catalogued content from 6 departments at this point, as well as some external or third-party content. Out of those 6 departments, 150 documents or videos have been identified as inaccessible to some degree.
All documents and videos are being tagged with a priority level based on the relative importance and visibility of that content. If a piece of content has a large audience, is required for staff to accomplish some task, and or is very visible, such as an important marketing video, these might be considered a critical priority, while a 5 year old report might be considered a low priority.
Of the 150 documents and videos identified so far, 88% are critical, 1% are high, 1% are medium, and 10% are low.
The breakdown of content is 64% documents, 36% video/audio, and less than 1% forms.
The most critical sets of documents are the Board of Trustees policies, currently in PDF format. PDF format is inherently inaccessible. Board policies, 114 of them, are actively being converted to HTML-based content. Another critical batch comes from the General Counsel and they tend to be legal guidance documents. At this point all of the legal advice documents have been converted to HTML-based web content as well as the Immigration Handbook.