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Virginia Tech Tries 'Compliance Sheriff' To Improve Web Site Accessibility

  • 08/13/08
Virginia Tech has selected HiSoftware's Compliance Sheriff to address management of its Web site accessibility. Compliance Sheriff is a browser-based service that crawls a Web site and compares pages against a user-defined set of criteria. The tool will compare the school's site against world-wide accessibility guidelines such as the federally-defined Section 508, which addresses how technology should be designed to enable its use by people with physical impairments, and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0/2.0, from the World Wide Web Consortium, which address Web content and mobile Web applications.

"Accessibility is no longer just about social responsibility, but key in providing a high quality Web presence for our students, faculty, and staff and for the public that we serve," said Bill Holbach, director of assistive technologies and research applications at Virginia Tech. "HiSoftware's Compliance Sheriff is another tool for Web site development at Virginia Tech that, when fully implemented, we expect to use for monitoring the quality of accessibility standards and providing a more functional and efficient Web presence."

Compliance Sheriff can e-mail reports or hyperlinks to the location of reports of all files verified or only those that fail compliance according to how the user configures the service. It also provides an online dashboard with report viewers and preview modes so users can test their pages for optimal performance under variable end-user scenarios.

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