Overview

These guidelines provide resources for campus departments and vendors to help ensure that IT products that the University procures are accessible to people with disabilities, and are consistent with institutional values for equity and inclusion.  

IT products should be fully usable by people with disabilities, so they have equally effective and timely access to it, as people without disabilities have.

Architecture and Security Review

Departments are encouraged to discuss proposed products, and those up for contract renewals, with the Architecture and Security Review team to help ensure they meet the University's expectations for accessibility.

HECVAT Questionnaire

Princeton relies on the most current version of the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit to help it assess data, cybersecurity and accessibility risk.Vendors should provide the HECVAT Full or Lite questionnaire in advance of an Architecture and Security Review.

VPAT Report

The University expects suppliers to have their products tested by professionals with accessibility quality assurance testing expertise, using testing best practices, and to document the accessibility of their products using the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) report. Suppliers should use the 2.4 WCAG version of the report to indicate conformance to the World Wide Web Consortium's Content Accessibility Guidelines.

The VPAT template should be filled out in its entirety and include:

• Testing methodology and accessibility expertise of the evaluator
• Conformance level for each criteria
• Detailed remarks for any partially-supported or non-supported level per the WCAG 2 success criteria.

For vendors that do not have expert accessibility quality assurance testing staff, the University highly recommends products be tested and documented by an industry-recognized accessibility testing company or organization.

Accessibility User Experience

Providing a good user experience for people with disabilities requires more than meeting technical standards.

While conformance to the WCAG standard ensures baseline access, IT products should provide a high quality user experience for people with disabilities. This includes eliminating elements of the interface and content that are confusing or cause the experience to be less than equally effective and timely. Princeton expects products to be designed for universal usability so that anyone who needs to use the product to accomplish their task can do so with a minimum of fuss or frustration and without error.

For suppliers that do not have expert user experience staff, the University highly recommends products be UX tested by an industry-recognized accessibility UX testing company or organization.

Accessibility Roadmap

Supplier are expected to provide the University with an Accessibility Roadmap (.docx) document, structured to match the test findings of accessibility and UX tests. Each issue to be remediated should indicate a date by which it will be fixed. 

Departments should ensure the contract requires the supplier to commit to the roadmap, and should follow up with the supplier on a regular basis.

Demonstration or Test

The University may request a demonstration of the product's accessibility, or may conduct its own testing. The supplier should be prepared to provide a test account as well as a tour of the accessibility features (demonstrating keyboard support, reflow, and screen reader support) of their product. In general, the University does not test until after the supplier has conducted its own thorough testing and attested to accessibility as described above.