Revelo Teams Up with University of Maryland for Digital Accessibility Pilot

Date: June 10, 2020

The challenges of quickly transitioning to online classes in response to the COVID-19 global health crisis highlight the urgent need for digital accessibility in higher education. Website designers and developers often overlook incorporating accessibility features and best practices and may be unaware that they have created an inaccessible website. iAccessible tests websites for digital accessibility, instructs developers on how to fix accessibility barriers, and teaches inclusive web design and development to prevent accessibility barriers.

Revelo Software, LLC (Revelo) has partnered with Dr. Jonathan Lazar, of the University of Maryland’s Trace Research and Development Center (Trace Center), to adapt iAccessible for use in his study, New Approaches to Automated Web Accessibility Testing Metrics to Improve Web Accessibility Outcomes in Organizations. Inspired by its partnership with Dr. Lazar, Revelo adapted iAccessible to continuously and automatically monitor the presence (or absence) of accessibility performance metrics of four pilot sites (three universities and one government agency) from January 2020 – January 2021.

Dr. Lazar’s larger study seeks to compare organizations’ accessibility policies and how those policies are implemented on their websites over time, as measured by the accessibility performance metrics outlined in Investigating the potential of a dashboard for monitoring U.S. federal website accessibility.[1] The Trace Research and Development Center is part of the University of Maryland College of Information Studies (iSchool). The Trace Center, a pioneer in the field of technology and disability, uses engineering, computer science, disability studies, and public policy to prevent barriers to information and telecommunication technologies.

Revelo is a real-time software platform that enables customized and automated data collection, analysis, and reporting. iAccessible, a Revelo product, provides decision makers with user-friendly insights into their respective organization’s digital accessibility trends over time and within the individual organization’s hierarchal structure.  

To learn more about iAccessible, please visit https://iAccessible.com/

[1] Lazar, J., Williams, V., Gunderson, J., & Foltz, T. (2017). Investigating the potential of a dashboard for monitoring US federal website accessibility. In Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii international conference on system sciences, 2428-2437.