The primary issue causing Sacramento State websites to fail AccMonitor scans is missing alt-text on images. Among the 20 websites in our cross section, there are 42,166 violations of Section 508 Section 1194.22, sub-section (a). This number is fairly remarkable, because the sites in our cross-section represent a a small percentage of our overall administrative web presence (roughly less than half).
Inaccessible forms (i.e. form fields without explicit labels) make up a large number of the errors detected in our cross sample. Fortunately, the majority of the forms in question appear to be simple forms (e.g. a search box with a single text field). There were a surprisingly low number of inaccessible complex web forms. Repairing these simple forms will be a straightforward task and we were able to identity and repair a large number of these forms during the review process.
While we did discover a large number of simple tables without appropriate headers, there were very few complex tables in the repair sample.
With the exception of two non-central pages, there is a one-to-one relationship between repair sample pages that use our campus web templates and those that are Section 508 compliant. Two pages in the repair sample that don't use our templates are accessible and one page that does use templates is inaccessible (due only to missing alt text on 5 images). For this reason, we are reevaluating the extent to which we market the use of campus templates to our web developers. We also plan to suggest conversion of older sites to the campus templates as a solution for not only compliance to campus look-and-feel standards, but web accessibility compliance as well.
There is a high demand for fly-out menus and other expandable/collapsible navigation system. Depending on the technology used to create these menus, the menus typically fail a manual evaluation. We have experimented with the CSS-driven menus (e.g. Sons of Suckerfish). While these menus are proven to satisfy the needs of non-visual users, they present new problems for keyboard-only visual users. Fly-out menus in general seem to cause issues for users without the hand coordination required to activate sub-menus within menus. We are continuing to investigate ways to allow our web developers to use fly-out menus that meet our accessibility requirements, while actively discouraging the use of these menus.
The age of the design, template, or codebase appears to have a strong effect on the accessibility of the site. Older pages lack consistent use of appropriate alt-text, separation of presentation and content, and rely more heavily on pop-up windows and other links dependant on JavaScript.
We are having trouble determining when and how to include the HiSoftware suite in our web accessibility training. Because of the lack of dedicated web staff, we haven't had time to determine whether or not AccVerify/AccRepair (compared to Dreamweaver and other tools) is the most appropriate tool to focus our training around.
Having spent significantly more time with AccMonitor, we are happy with this tool's server-side compliance scanning tools. We did experience some installation and licensing issues that required two phone calls and some e-mails to resolve. We also have some issues with the interface, most importantly the lack of a feature to duplicate an existing "web" configuration. Each of the rapidly increasing number of web configurations have to be configured from scratch which requires about two minutes of clicking and typing.