Accessibility Trail Blazers
In just a few short days, I will be embarking on yet another epic journey. This time I’ll be making the long trip out to the west coast to present at FOSSY 2024, the second Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference hosted by the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Taking place August 1 – 4, the conference will feature 3 ½ days of programming organized into multiple different tracks, such as community building, development, legal and licensing issues, etc. I will be delivering a presentation as part of the “FOSS in Education” track designed to “highlight the profound impact educational institutions have on the development and propagation of open source software and broader open initiatives.”
As part of the team responsible for pioneering what we’ve coined a “new reviewer-friendly VPAT”, my talk will describe how the open source Sakai community has implemented a series of changes to our standard VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) process and report with the VPAT-reviewer (end user) audience in mind - which to our knowledge, represents a revolutionary approach to this work - for an open source project, or any other type organization for that matter.
This year’s FOSSY conference will once again take place at Portland State University, which got me to thinking about how fitting it is that Oregon will serve as the setting for this event, considering the topic I will be presenting about, and the multi-year journey it has taken Sakai to get to this point.
As I contemplated the magnitude of our team’s achievement, ground-breaking work that certainly allows us to stake the claim to being accessibility trail blazers in our own right, it harkened me back to my elementary school days playing the classic “Oregon Trail” computer game on one of those primitive TRS 80 consoles, fully immersing myself into the perilous 2D adventure of a 19th century settler traversing the expansive western plains and treacherous mountain passes on their way out to the Pacific Northwest.
While we share Oregon as the final destination of our respective journeys, at least in the metaphorical sense, we have had our own unique twists and turns along the way that we have had to navigate, even if Sakai’s recent VPAT experience isn’t quite on par with that of those O.G. trail blazers depicted in the video game “That’s a bit of an understatement” says old-timey frontier prospector guy who just had to use a cast iron griddle to defend his camp site from an angry grizzly bear
For one, unlike the highly pixelized avatars of our trail blazing ancestors who had to regularly contend with rattle snakes, hunger, marauders, and dysentery, the types of challenges that the Sakai community had to overcome throughout the course of our project never quite rose to the level of being considered life-and-death circumstances, although devoting countless hours to analyzing the nuanced components of the VPAT report (especially the expanded “Success Criteria” tables used in the VPAT International versions which incorporate the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Revised Section 508, and EN 301 549 European Harmonised standards into a single report template) is not for the faint of heart.
While the original Oregon Trail over-land journey was measured in miles and months, Sakai’s accessibility journey has been defined by a multi-year, iterative approach that has helped to get us to this point.
Where the early settlers hitched their oxen to Conestoga wagons, Sakai has continued to place its trust in individuals and organizations with in-depth accessibility expertise, like our informal VPAT advisor Gonzalo Silverio, and our partner Vision-Aid, who’s blind/low-vision team members have shouldered much of the manual functional verification testing load.
When the frontier parties faced adversity, they pressed on because they knew that there was this promise of a better life waiting for them at the conclusion of their journey, similar to how we have been unwavering in our pursuit of a better VPAT report, and the promise that current and prospective customers will view these as welcome changes, which should translate to a better VPAT experience for all involved.
“Congratulations! You have made it to Oregon!”
This is the message that flashes on the screen when you win the “Oregon Trail” video game. I had to actually Google this, because successfully completing the game is apparently so rare that I don’t believe I was ever able to do it, and being immortalized as a “Trail blazer” seems like something my 8-year old self would have remembered.
Of course, you don’t get to define whether or not you’re a trail blazer, only future events can determine that.
Those early Oregon settlers earned the nickname “trail blazers” because approximately 268,000 other people decided to follow them out west.
Which begs the question…will other free and open source software projects choose to follow in Sakai’s footsteps, and adopt their own reviewer-friendly version of the VPAT report?
Will these changes we implemented to the standard VPAT process and report resonate with other organizations who have similarly struggled with overly complex systems for reporting compliance with accessibility standards?
Will Sakai’s streamlined, common-sense approach to this work lead to a new way of doing VPATs, or help to spark more conversation about how to evolve the VPAT report template to better align with the needs of industry?
Will we see more and more organizations start to develop and implement their own community-sourced accessibility strategies, as they begin to realize that a VPAT is just a point in time, and it’s their accessibility strategy that has real staying power?
Its these and other questions that will need to be answered, which means that we will need to start reaching a broader audience, and begin engaging in more dialogue.
But let’s not put the Conestoga wagon before the oxen.
The fact that I have been afforded the opportunity to present about our new reviewer-friendly VPAT at FOSSY 2024 next week is a great start, and I’m looking forward to sharing details about our approach with the other conference attendees, and hopefully inviting some of them along on this journey with us.