Did you know that the Federal Americans with Disability Act (ADA) and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires organizations like ours make our internal caregiver-facing and external patient-facing websites and online tools accessible to those with disabilities. It’s the law!
Under both Section 508 of the ADA’s Rehabilitation Act and Section 1557 of Patient Protection and ACA, we must ensure our electronic technologies are accessible to individuals with disabilities, such as those with vision requirements who need certain types of screen readers that are only compatible with specific types of web coding. To ensure PSJH stays compliant with these laws, the IS Quality Assurance (QA) & Testing team, within IS Administrative & Consulting Services, has received system leadership endorsement of a system-wide web accessibility policy.
Supporting this newly-drafted policy is a 508 “advisory council,” composed of members of stakeholder from IS QA, Contracting, Providence Health Plan, Marketing, Compliance, Government Affairs, Corporate Council, and HR. This group of accessibility- and technology-focused stakeholders began meeting in January 2019 and will continue meeting the third Friday of every month to support compliance around these critical policies.
QA Tools for Supporting Accessibility Compliance
The IS QA team has selected Deque Tools as our vendor for scanning our various websites to assess accessibility compliance. That team supports and maintains those tools used to check and report on WCAG 2.0 A/AA compliance, as well as the automated and manual testing that backs it up. Installation of these tools was completed in December 2018 and the team is focused on training partners on how to use the tools and complete compliance auditing throughout Q1 of this year.
Resources
- Read the draft PSJH 508 web accessibility policy (PSJH-EIS-903)
- Review the standard operating procedure (SOP)/charter of the 508 advisory council
Contacts
If you have questions or are interested in participating in the advisory council/quorum, which meets the third Thursday of every month, from 2:00-3:00 p.m. (PT), contact Terry Virdell, Director, QA & Testing.