Welcome to our Accessibility Blog

Welcome to our brand new Accessibility blog!

2009 has been a very busy year for all of us involved in our accessibility efforts at RightNow, and I and the rest of the team working on our accessibility initiatives are going to be using this medium to communicate our philosophy on providing comparible access for all users regardless of physical ability, as well as highlighting some of the dilemmas and difficult decisions that had to be made during the project process. We will also be highlighting the fruits of our labors and giving you insight into the features that have been added to address accessibility needs. Our hope is that you get to develop a better understanding of the depth and sincerity of our commitment to accessibility, and even get to pick up pointers and best practices that you can use on your own accessibility efforts.

Accessibility is not a new area of focus for us at RightNow. Our intial work on Accessibility took place more than 4 years ago, as we worked alongside a customer, the Veterans Association, to build out an accessible agent interface delivered within a web browser. That project allows agents to perform key tasks for incident and answer management within an interface specifically built for the users of screen readers. The success of that work proved the value of direct interaction with disabled users, something we were able to return to in our efforts this year. Shortly after the work on the accessibility interface was accomplished, and as a result of the learning that took place on the initial project, we were able to able to add screen reader support to our ‘Classic’ web self-service pages. We are proud that those accessibility features have been supported in our product suite for several years now.

So, what have we been working on this year? Well, 2009 has been all about adding accessibility support to Customer Portal and expanding our definition of what accessibility means beyond the limited confines of Section 508 of the US Disabilities Act (1999) to address a broader definition of comparable access. We have also taken the opportunity to add new features to our Accessibility Interface for Agents, in order that agents with disabilities working on customer enquiries can work as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Why wasn’t Customer Portal accessible from the beginning? is a question I occasionally have to field and answer. During the design and development work for Customer Portal in 2007/08, we wrestled with how to provide an accessible solution right from initial launch and finally came to the conclusion that making it truly accessible meant that we had to address accessibility as a separate initiative, and that trying to wrap in accessibility support as one small part of a much broader initiative was unlikely to be successful. Big projects, and Customer Portal was one of the biggest projects that RightNow has ever undertaken, tend to be littered with design changes and scope compromises and in hindsight, I am happy that we started work on accessibility as a separate effort as soon as the dust settled on the initial CP launch. Addressing accessibility as its own priority initiative allowed us to develop something that we believe is truly best of breed, rather than an expedient nod in the direction of accessibility needs that might prove difficult to unravel from the product in the future. It also allowed us time to investigate and develop a deep understanding of what it meant to provide accessibility on Rich Internet Applications, a challenge that has occupied many other software and service organizations looking to deliver great web experiences as the web migrates from older static page technologies to newer technologies like AJAX.

The scope of what we have delivered is truly comprehensive and I will only touch on the highlights in this blog entry and won’t steal the thunder of our other contributors who will be giving you a more detailed overview of our accessibility work. The goals that guided the project were the following:

• Meet the Standards and Guidelines addressing accessible web experiences: This typically means 508 for US-based customers, but 508 is not applicable outside of the US – and at this point isn’t legally binding outside of the federal government although we expect that to change at some point in the future, or for 508 to be superseded by laws with a wider mandate.  We spent a great deal of effort on both the Customer Portal and Accessibility Interface project to ensure that we met the technical requirements of 508, and also with a view to 508 being redrafted in the very near future, spent a lot of time looking at the TEITAC advisory committees draft recommendations on changes to 508.  We also worked with Terri Youngblood, from Accessible Systems, to ensure that we tested against the current standard and future revisions (the recommendations for which Terri has been intimately involved in as part of her work with TEITAC). For those of you outside of the US, we also spent a lot of time reviewing and working to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 specification, published in October of last year, to ensure that the web experience we delivered out of the box could be tested to meet the AA tier requirements of the W3C’s accessibility standard.
• Ensure that the solution is usable: We are keenly aware that meeting a standard or guideline doesn’t mean that the end-product is usable by all target audiences. Ironically, another standard came to our aid here. PAS 78, a UK BSI standard, requires solutions to be designed and tested with people with disabilities in order to deliver a great user experience for all. Our Development team and Usability Lead used this standard in their work with testers to ensure that our initial design prototypes were refined, and test cases were extended and validated. We owe a debt to all those testers that helped us polish the design and meet our usability goals.
• Ensure that we are in line with emerging technologies for providing accessible and rich experiences: The internet is changing – something that should be obvious to all of us that expect our web experiences today to be dynamic, interactive and engaging. We wanted to ensure that people with disabilities were not excluded from having those rich experiences. We’ve addressed this by supporting WAI-ARIA on the browsers that currently support it (as of writing for IE8 & Firefox 3+). Currently, we support the role specific features of ARIA – expect the level of support for the ARIA toolkit and standard to continue to mature and expand in future RightNow releases as ARIA continues to gain adoption.
• Treat accessibility as a best practice: It would have been a much shorter project to develop a separate web self service interface for people with disabilities. But the range of disabilities and the variance in terms of the  needs of people with disabilities makes accessibility a best practice not only for RightNow, but conceivably any experience you are looking to deliver on the web. We rebuilt our out of the box template to be highly accessible to all. It is our hope that our approach encourages all our customers to provide accessible experiences to their consumers, regardless of whether they are  legally bound to provide an accessible experience or not.

We are very excited by the fruits of our labors over the past few months – particularly given the enthusiastic feedback from the test users who helped us refine our test prototypes and played a pivotal part in helping us deliver great experiences for all users, regardless of physical ability or peripheral preference. Our focus on accessibility doesn’t finish with the completion of the projects I have outlined today. There are several exciting projects in the works within our Web Experience Center of Excellence that address accessibility needs for new features and capabilities, and I look forward to being able to share details on those projects, and how we addressed accessibility within those projects, with you over the coming months on our blog. I also look forward to your feedback as you start to use these capabilities. Let us know what you think of what we have delivered in the CX November 09 release, what you like, what you don’t like,  and what you think we could be doing better in order to help us meet our company objective of ridding the world of bad experiences, by delivering great a web experience for all.