For US financial firms, testing websites for accesibility and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act has become even more important under the Biden administration, which is more supportive of the Americans with Disabilities Act than its predecessor.
And the European Commission is reviewing the EU’s existing directive on website accessibility before June 2022 to ensure it is “fit for purpose”.
Increasingly, good accessibility is not just good UX – it’s now a legal risk that banks have to manage on a daily basis.
QA Financial’s seminar on June 30th is designed to bring you right up to date with regulatory requirements, and how legal risk can be minimised with automated testing (register to attend here). Our guest presenter is Gregory Williams, strategy consultant at Deque Systems, the leading accessibility testing specialist. In the one-hour seminar, we will provide a primer on digital accessibility case law; the key things firms must do in order to minimise legal risk, and the simple things you can do to prevent a costly lawsuit or complaint.
Deque says that it has conducted a study using anonymised data from over 2,000 audits in various industries covering nearly 300,000 accessibility issues which found that 57% of accessibility issues can be identified by its automated technology. That compares with a widespread assumption that automated accessibility testing only provides coverage of between 20% and 30%.
According to Deque, that lower range of expectation derives from the relatively narrow range of success criteria for testing laid down in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines produced by the World Wide Web Consortium, the industry body for the internet. Deque says that its analysis shows this method of measurement downplays the effectiveness of automated testing. Measuring the total volume of issues detected by severity and impact is a more meaningful and accurate metric, partly because some issues occur much more frequently than others.
