Formal Review Levels

I'll post further comments later this week, but I wanted to present my
initial thoughts from Friday morning's discussion  concerning the idea
of  formal review levels. I will separately post the draft "one-pager"
I've been working on, which would have the intended audience of the
Chief Information Officers of US federal government agencies.

I believe we do need to have some sort of formal review levels, so that
we can refer to a "Review Level 2" as identifying that
certain steps were included in a review process, so that reviews can be
compared to a certain degree.

I would see the levels as a continuum, from:

      Level 1: Basic level review that could be reasonably accomplished
by a webmaster or web content developer
      (expected to be conducted as part of web development)

      Level 2 ( ... ): Either one or multiple levels of review, which
would provide in-between levels of effort. For example, a
      review that could be conducted within an organization by a
dedicated technical staff within a reasonable timeframe.

      Level 3 (or N): Comprehensive Accessibility Review, which could
only reasonably be conducted by establishing a
      relationship (contract) with a professional services firm with an
established lab that could evaluate web pages on or with
      multiple operating systems, browsers, versions of browsers, and
versions of assistive technologies (user agents?).


For this type of Level system to be practical, the levels should be
additive, so that a Level 2 review would be additional
procedures to Level 1. It would also be extremely helpful to identify
which access issues are addressed (or left remaining as
potential outstanding issues) after each level review

 ___

For discussion purposes and to assist me with defining one of my
projects, I would welcome comments on what people think
of the "Check Your Page" tool I've been developing. Comments provided
through the "webmaster" link at the bottom of the
generated page would be most helpful, since it will address a message to
me with the URI of the site included in the subject.

Short description for Check Your Page:
This would be the "techie" version; I'd probably also need to have a one
sentence description for the "non-techie" audience.

      A "meta evaluation tool" at the webpage level that provides direct
links to several of the analysis tools' results for a
      specified publicly-available page, which would simplify the
process for people having to go to each tool page and enter
      the URL individually.


Background page on the tool:
http://w3.gsa.gov/web/m/cita.nsf/help/CheckYourPage

Direct Link to Input Form:
http://w3.gsa.gov/web/m/cita.nsf/help/YourPage?OpenForm

Karl Hebenstreit, Jr.
US General Services Administration
Office of Governmentwide Policy
Center for Information Technology Accommodation
Website:  http://www.itpolicy.gsa.gov/cita
Section 508 Website:  http://www.section508.gov

Received on Tuesday, 2 May 2000 00:31:33 UTC