Re: Seeking feedback on IAAP certification roadmap

Hi Paul,

A few years back I joined the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWD) who had a similar intention. 
I just checked and their website is no longer functioning. I fear that you have a really high mountain to climb!

One very serious problem with certifying professional competence is the credibility of the certifying body, as GAWD discovered, people will not pay hard cash for a certificate that does not have real credibility (and thus real value in the job market). I could not find any reference in your road map to seeking any partnerships that would give you the required credibility. There are quite a few Universities that have good accessibility departments. One I know of is the University Wisconson/Madison’s Dept of IT  (https://www.doit.wisc.edu/accessibility/ ) and TRACE Centre (http://trace.wisc.edu/). There are certainly many others.

It is much easier to certify that a website is accessible (i.e. does it comply with WCAG) than that a person has professional competence, so I strongly suggest that you urgently seek one or more partners who can bring credibility to your venture.

Richard Warren
http://www.userite.com
P.S. It would also help your credibility if your site used valid HTML code (check by using http://validator.w3.org)



From: Paul Bohman 
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2014 6:15 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org 
Subject: Seeking feedback on IAAP certification roadmap

Cross posted request for feedback:


The International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) needs your feedback on our roadmap for accessibility certification. Here is the roadmap as it stands now:


http://www.accessibilityassociation.org/content.asp?contentid=163


We are still in the early stages of designing the certification, so your feedback is most valuable now, before we commit to a certain path.


Here are some questions to consider as you read the roadmap:

  1.. What do you think of the roadmap overall? 
  2.. What would you do to improve our roadmap?

  3.. What do you think of the levels of certification outlined in the roadmap? 

  4.. Are there any broad Knowledge Domains and Roles that we have left off that should be included? 
  5.. Do you like our list of Digital Accessibility areas of certification? Should we add to or subtract from this list? (For example, one person commented that we should add gaming to the list.) 
  6.. Do you like the idea of certifying for these areas separately, in a modular approach as we have done? (See the section on Referencing IAAP Credentials for an explanation of how this might work)

  7.. Do you like the 3 year period for certification? Would you make it shorter (2 years) or longer (5 years)? 
  8.. What kind of certification assessment would you create? Keep in mind that it has to be a valid and meaningful test of the right kind of competencies, it must be challenging enough that novices could not pass it without first studying or gaining experience,  it must be scalable (not too burdensome to administer or grade/score the assessment), and translatable into other languages.

  9.. Once certification becomes available, do you think you would go through the process to become certified? Why or why not? 
  10.. What else should we consider as we move forward?
To give feedback, you can reply directly to this email, or you can send an email to the certification committee: CC@accessibilityassociation.org



Paul Bohman, PhD
Chair, IAAP Certification Committee
Director of Training
Deque Systems, Inc
www.deque.com
703-225-0380, ext.121
Richard Warren
Technical Manager
Website Auditing Limited (Userite)
http://www.userite.com