Accessibility contract wording

VanessaJW · Jun 7th, 2007, 07:30

I was wondering what sort of wording people on here use in reference to accessibility within website contracts/agreements, e.g. would you just put something fairly general like:

'The site will conform to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines'

Or would you specify minimum conformance Level A, or Double-A, and would you mention something about WCAG 1.0 changing to WCAG 2.0 sometime soon and therefore taking account of that should the change happen during the site development?

I'm coming at this from the other side - I'm on a website working group at work and we have an external contractor doing a new site for us. They have currently put that the website will 'Conform to W3C accessibility standards', so what I'm really asking here is whether I should be asking them to spell it out a bit more specifically?

welshstew · Jun 7th, 2007, 08:50

I would get them to be specific, otherwise you may have a conflict in expectations of the delivery.

You may be expecting the site to be fully compliant to double-a, but he/she may only deliver to single-a.

If your success criteria isn't stated at the beggining of the project how will you know if it has been a success or delivered in line with expectations?

You should sit down and come up with a list of your success criteria for this project. These criteria should be measurable and specific (i.e. meets double-a compliance checks, fulfils customer requirements to look/feel & content, works with differing browsers, computer systems, & displays, etc) so that you are all aware of what is required for the project to be deemed a success.

The criteria needs to be clear enough to help you measure the success of the project but also felxible, so that you are able to move the goal posts if needed during the project lifecycle.

Does that help??

VanessaJW · Jun 7th, 2007, 09:04

Thanks for this, I think we're fine on the rest of the criteria, everything else has been quite specific, it was just the accessibility bit I felt was a bit woolly.

I just wanted to check really that I was right in expecting it to be more specific.

welshstew · Jun 7th, 2007, 09:18

No probs, apologies for giving to much info, have my project hat on at the mo as we are reviewing our processes............*yawn*

VanessaJW · Jun 7th, 2007, 09:44

No need to apologise - too much is always better than not enough!

sannbe · Jun 12th, 2007, 01:45

Vanessa, one thing to remember about contracts is you will find yourself adding and taking out things to fit your clients needs.