Margaret Klein, Director, Office for Diversity and Equality, MDVA Accessibility Coordinator

Forming a project team to design a new software tool with wide reaching impact can be a daunting task – even before your agency’s Accessibility Coordinator does their job by asking “will this new business tool meet the state’s accessibility standard?” During this past year, one project team stepped up to this challenge, and in doing so, also created a new scoring system for their Request for Proposals (RFP) evaluation.

At the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs (MDVA) a project team set out to obtain and implement a wide-reaching business tool for supervisors, employees, and payroll staff. Employees will use this new tool to retrieve their work schedule, punch in and out, be paid shift differential for night and weekend work, make leave requests, and be assigned overtime. This new software would replace outdated technologies and impact nearly 1,300 employees.

We’ve all heard that it’s more cost effective to plan for accessibility on the front end than it is to fix inaccessible systems after they’re implemented. So, if we expect a new wide-reaching business tool such as this to meet the state’s accessibility standard, how do we measure proposed solutions and make the best-informed decision we can?

Nearly all RFPs submitted through the state include this boilerplate requirement:

Completed Accessibility Compliance Voluntary Product/Service Accessibility (508 VPAT and WCAG 2.0 VPAT).*

What does this requirement mean and how does it help an agency ensure that the product purchased meets these legal standards?

A VPAT® is a checklist that includes all the components of the accessibility standard. Vendors submitting a response to an RFP use this checklist to affirm how their product supports accessibility in accordance with each technical criteria. The state also recommends that the form be completed by a person well-versed in the technical aspects of the product’s support for accessibility. Respondents are encouraged to review the relevant guidance forms in the "Products" tab of the Accessible IT Procurement section of the Office of Accessibility website.

This project team went one step further by integrating accessibility requirements throughout the evaluation process. They considered the existence of a fair and consistent evaluation of accessibility within the RFP process to be as important as defining the key business requirements for the desired product. A critical first step was for the RFP selection committee to receive training on what accessibility means and what the state accessibility standard requires. People don’t know what they don’t know, making training important to a successful outcome. In addition, the project team allocated points in the initial screening phase for accessibility.

After the proposals were evaluated according to all screening criteria, including business, technical, and accessibility requirements and points assigned, high scoring vendors were asked to demonstrate their product to the RFP selection committee. These presentations were focused on core business requirements and specific functional exercises. Before the presentations, vendors were provided with specific information on the evaluation process. They were told to be prepared to present specific functionalities, including accessibility.

The RFP selection committee was able to observe and evaluate the ability of the vendor to meet requirements such as requesting time off for an employee, clocking in and out of work, obtaining work schedules, and bidding for overtime, as well as is the accessibility of each interface.

Throughout the presentations, the RFP selection committee reminded the vendor to demonstrate key specifications, such as requiring a certain exercise be performed twice, with keyboard only and with mouse only. The RFP selection committee could see whether the vendor really understood how their product meets our accessibility standard.

To assist in the scoring of vendor demonstrations, the RFP selection committee was provided a draft evaluation sheet, or rubric, that called out specific elements to look for, such as keyboard accessibility. The reviewers used this rubric to score how the vendors performed those exercises from an accessibility perspective. In this way, real accessibility points could be attributed to each vendor’s proposal.

Project teams and RFP selection committees do important work in helping the state of Minnesota to be legally compliant, and in making state employment an option for qualified persons with disabilities. The multi-phased model used by this project team brought the agency forward by making accessibility a normal part of business.

The goal of the state’s Accessibility Standard is to improve the accessibility and usability of information technology products and services for all government end users in Minnesota. The standard incorporates the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Supplementing the standard are statutes on public records (363A.42) and continuing education (363A.43) effective January 1, 2013 that can make agencies financially liable for inaccessible records and other documents and course material modified or produced after that date.

*Editor’s note: At this time of this project, there were two VPAT documents. Since then, all content has been merged into a single VPAT document. See the companion blog post VPAT 2.x.

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