RE: Test Management Tools - Accessibility Guidelines

Hi Everyone,
I work for a company that provides Quality Assurance and I have started a side project to outline the Accessibility Standards A-AAA which we should provide when delivering QA for our clients (as this is currently known by our consultants and not documented). My hope was to outline the main standards for all consultants in the company so that we can provide the best and consistent Accessibility testing for our clients.
We develop our own websites and Test Management Tools in house and I believe that if we are providing Accessibility testing to clients, we should also have products which are accessibility friendly. I am trying to outline some standards which should be used by our Developers for our Test Management Tools  - as we have Web, Desktop and Sharepoint versions - but our tools are for use by Testers and not the general public.
I wanted to get a few opinions as to if a testing tool would need to be Accessible or would this be unnecessary work? I have checked w3.org/WAI<http://w3.org/WAI> to see if there are any guidelines for this but only web content, user agents and Authoring Tools seem to have been covered. Any feedback on this subject would be appreciated.
Thank you
Samantha
Hi Samantha,
I think it makes sense that any testing tools you develop should themselves be accessible, especially given the accessibility focus of these testing tools.
Some relevant guidelines might be the IBM Software Accessibility Guidelines. Whilst originally developed for Java applications, these are fairly broad in scope and I have used them when evaluating other application types for accessibility.
For instance, a key requirement is for applications to be made keyboard accessible. It doesn't specify how to go about this, as this depends on platform\development language etc.
You can read more about the IBM guidelines here: http://www-03.ibm.com/able/guidelines/software/accesssoftware.html
HTH
Joe