Application Assessments: Typical Engagement

The HiSoftware Accessibility Consulting Practice (ACP) team includes software testers and developers who can deliver exceptional results. Unlike most consulting firms, the ACP team uses industry-proven test and development strategies and personnel. We create test cases and document bugs the way that major software companies expect—creating objective, repeatable, and replicable tests. Unlike most testing companies, however, the ACP team is highly focused on accessibility for persons with disabilities. This means that our testers know how to use assistive technology extremely well and use different AT’s continuously for hours each day.

Defining Scope of Work

A typical engagement for our team starts with understanding your requirements and creating a statement of work that addresses your specific needs. We spend as much time as necessary trying to understand the scope of our customer’s requirements and to define the scope of work. This is important for making sure that our customers get the attention they need while being as cost-effective as possible.

Defining the Assessment Scope - Accessibility is a highly-specialized area that often requires many hours of manual testing— the cost and scope of the project is often very dependent on an application’s size and complexity. A HiSoftware sales representative can help guide you to the most cost-effective solution for your needs. During this stage, customers can customize the services to include development of test cases, bug tracking, and VPAT creation.

Defining the Scope of Other Products and Services - We also spend time understanding our customer’s requirements for product subscriptions, training, help desk support, and other services. These products and services can begin anywhere in the development life cycle. In addition to helping our customers “become compliant” as quickly as possible, our customers find that adding these services early helps reduce the overall price of our products and services as we can offer discounts through bundling.

Statement of Work - Once the project scope has been defined, we provide the client with a Statement of Work clearly defining the deliverables of the Assessment, the estimated time for completing this work, and the price. The price of a Web Assessment is based on the amount of hours it will take to perform the tests, document the findings, build the Assessment Reports and review with the customer. In addition, the Statement of Work will include the cost of other products and services bundled with the Assessment, together with a description of the discounts offered.

Performance of Assessment

For Accessibility Assessments, this can include multiple Standards testing (usually Section 508 and various international standards).

Assessment Report - The Assessment Deliverable usually takes the form of a high-level Powerpoint Overview of the major issues, specific examples identified that have accessibility problems and code-repair examples to fix these issues. Customers also receive a detailed report of AT User Report for the usability issues found from the JAWS or WindowEyes testing. If included in the Statement of Work, this report can also include a general usability assessment from testing by a blind user.

Integrating with Defect Tracking Systems - As we work closely with large software companies, our team is highly-skilled at working with a number of bug tracking systems.

Test Cases - Modern software applications can include tens of thousands of different commands. To provide a cost-effective solution, we can develop test cases and are also well-versed in working with customer-provided test cases. Alternatively, for very large and complex software packages (where it may be impractical or not cost-effective to create test cases), we can document repeatable UI sequences and menu interactions—thus enabling your team to know exactly what UI elements were examined and to identify additional steps to be tested by our ACP team.

VPAT Development - The HiSoftware ACP team are industry leaders in VPAT best practices. Recognizing this, many of our customer’s ask us to develop VPATs for them, thus helping them win new customers [include link to VPAT page].

Review of Assessment Report - We then set up either an on-site or web-demo/conference-call to review the report and findings. We want to ensure we provide the proper knowledge transfer to the customer for all the issues found in the Assessment and a recommendation for resolving all issues.

Additional Products and Deliverables - As noted above, most of our customers find that making the straightforward corrections identified in the Initial Assessment eliminates over 90% of their accessibility problems. Most of our customers find that our products and services help them be proactive and stay accessible. After the first year, most customers discover the services component decreases significantly as they develop in-house expertise, mature processes, and a “culture of accessibility.” Unlike traditional consulting companies, HiSoftware is first and foremost a software company focused on giving you the tools to be independent.

The HiSoftware team includes some of most respected IT and policy professionals in the accessibility field. If your product group is interested in learning more about HiSoftware’s Application Assessment services contact us today.