ITAG Purchasing Partnership Initiative

Procurement Directors and Information Technology Accessibility Group Partnership on IT Accessibility Charter

Discover alignment, and develop and establish shared approaches to vendor relationship management that can leverage the economy of scale of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (Consortium), foster vendor commitment to digital accessibility, and facilitate digital accessibility improvements in software and services.

Overview:  The Consortium Members, while working collaboratively, currently do not do as much as they could to leverage their coalition in regards to the accessibility of IT products purchased. Vendors are able to dismiss demands for product accessibility because accessibility requirements differ widely between schools. Further, the maturity of the procurement process varies, some Consortium Members have robust accessibility requirements while others have room for improvement. There is a need for shared minimum standards and best-practices for accessibility in IT procurements.

The Consortium was created to facilitate collaboration between Members, and this working group can put in place a process whereby an increasingly robust and trusted set of shared standards and best-practices may be developed. Further, the group can institute an educational program that will help fill in gaps in institutional knowledge regarding accessibility and share new learning as it is gleaned from ongoing collaboration.

This partnership has identified the following four goals to address IT accessibility:

Goal 1 Education & Communication:  Create an educational/communication strategy and action plan to explain to potential vendors what the Consortium Members mean by “IT Accessibility”.  This plan will provide new vendors with an overview of how to create accessible content and what methods the Consortium Members may use to evaluate accessibility.

Deliverables

• Complete first edition of the accessibility “Cookbook”
• Determine whether a summary or overview of the Cookbook requirements can be created
• Publish the Cookbook & summary on an external-facing web page through the Consortium
• Send out Consortium Members’ press releases describing the Cookbook and how to access it
• Establish a review plan to address update changes to the Cookbook
• Provide education to Consortium Members about the Cookbook and what is meant by IT Accessibility
• Provide access to the finished Cookbook to other consortia which may be interested in utilizing this information in their solicitations
• Create audience-specific Cookbook extracts e.g., versions specifically for documentation authors, decision makers, etc.

Goal 2 Solicitation Requirements:  Develop standard requirements for Consortium Members to include in solicitations for IT purchases.

Deliverables

• Obtain all current requirements from Consortium Members and determine which requirements are common
• Use current requirements from Consortium Members as a framework to create standard questions in solicitations for respondents to answer to assess the current accessibility standards met and the vendor’s access plan to address accessibility concerns going forward
• Establish standard requirements which can be included in a solicitation document to address IT accessibility (in theory these requirements should carry over to contracts executed from the solicitation instead of trying to incorporate these requirements in Consortium Members’ contract boilerplate language)
• Provide the completed requirements to other consortia which may be interested in utilizing this information in their solicitations
• Create language in solicitation documents to explain how IT accessibility information may be shared amongst Consortium Members

Goal 3 Standardized Evaluation:  Develop a common approach to evaluating vendor’s responses. To begin after creation of requirements in Goal 2.

Deliverables

• Determine what tools are available to Consortium Members to test IT accessibility
• Establish best practices to determine compliance with the proposed Consortium IT accessibility requirements
• Identify how purchases which do not require a solicitation (e.g. small purchase, sole source, etc.) can be evaluated and recommended back to the Consortium Procurement Directors for joint negotiations (e.g. COMSOL)
• Create an evaluation document to provide consistency in evaluation of IT accessibility
• Establish a training schedule to train Consortium Members on how to properly complete IT accessibility evaluations
• Provide access to the training and accessibility evaluation guidelines to other consortia which may be interested in utilizing this information
• Identify how evaluations which are not IT accessible will be re-evaluated to determine future compliance

Goal 4 Leverage Consortium to Work with Vendors to Improve Accessibility and Sharing of Information: Establish methods to engage vendors to address accessibility concerns for products used across Consortium Members and develop a shared repository to host the results of IT accessibility evaluations.

Deliverables

• Determine the best way to capture the evaluation documentation created in Goal 3
• Identify a location on the Consortium web page to host a shared repository of IT accessibility evaluations
• Incorporate date, time and the contact information for the individual responsible for completion of the evaluation into the posting
• Review whether this information can be shared internally or externally
• Provide access to the evaluation database, if allowable, to other consortia
• Determine how other schools can comment on a previously completed evaluation
• Determine how Consortium will identify vendors which the consortium should engage with to leverage the collective spend to meet accessibility requirements

Timeline:  The proposed timeline shows completion dates for goals 1 through 3.  These goals are somewhat dependent on their predecessors, but there is the ability to overlap the start of one goal with the prior goal. If we are able to maintain this timeline, we would have completion of goals 1 through 3 in January of 2018, which coincides with the Section 508/WCAG 2.0 alignment.  Completion of goal 4 will need to be assessed after completion of goals 1 through 3 to determine what type of information is proposed to be shared and whether we are able to share the information.

• Goal 1:Completion end of July
• Goal 2: Completion end of October
• Goal 3:Completion end of January
• Goal 4:TBD

Upon completion of the goals, we will also have to maintain each of the deliverables.

Participants:  Representation is being provided by Consortium Members from both the procurement and the IT accessibility fields. Each field also has representation from the Consortium.  

Current Members are:

Purchasing			IT Accessibility
Participant	University Representing		Participant	University Representing
Ted Eisenhut	Michigan		Jane Berliss-Vincent	Michigan
Jim Konrad	Northwestern		Nate Evans	Michigan State
Dan Szajna	Illinois		Keith Hays	Illinois
Kim Watson	Maryland

Consortium Representative           Consortium Representative
Jeff Oberg                                                        Lori Frost