State of Colorado Department of Education

The Business Problem

The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) is the state agency for Colorado pre-K through12 public education, adult literacy, and libraries. The CDE is also the administrative arm of the Colorado State Board of Education, and serves as a statewide link for Colorado's 176 school districts, providing them with leadership, consultation and administrative services.  

The CDE’s commitment to high standards, tough assessments, and rigorous accountability measures extends to its Web site. The CDE Web site serves as a public source of information.

The CDE Web site was created and is managed using Microsoft® FrontPage®. The Web site contains approximately 4,000 searchable HTML pages and 1,500 downloadable files, with 100 new documents being added monthly.  In September 2001 alone, the CDE Web site had 48,944 unique visitors, with an average of 4,818 visits a day.

On January 19, 2001, the Colorado Commission on Information Management  (IMC) adopted the Colorado Information Technology Accessibility Standards for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Compliance requirements for Colorado IT Accessibility Standards went into effect July 1, 2001.  State agencies needed to ensure IT Accessibility Standards compliance on their web sites when developing new web pages and web sites, or when changes were made to web pages.  Changes to web pages were defined as “every time a file is written/re-written to the server.”

Colorado Department of Education Webmaster, Stephen Thergesen, began his repair work using technology that was available to him at no cost. However, he quickly determined that he needed to look for alternative solutions because of excessive delays in repairing areas of the Web site, as well as Web site repair labor and materials costs.

The CDE web site is organized into FrontPage sub webs that represent programmatic content groupings within the organization. Each sub web is assigned one or more "Web Content Coordinators" who use FrontPage to publish new and revised content to their respective sub webs.Responsibility for the Root Web's content rests with the Webmaster and Web Support Specialist. In April 2001 Mr. Thergesen began evaluating technologies that could assist him in verification and repair of accessibility issues in his FrontPage-based Web site.

The Solution

The Colorado Department of Education purchased HiSoftware’s AccVerify and AccRepair for Microsoft® FrontPage®. AccVerify provides for the verification of accessibility policy and standards required for Web Sites under the Rehabilitation Act Section 508 and W3C® Priority 1 guidelines.  As information is added to a Web site, AccVerify reports on whether all elements are in compliance.

AccRepair uses the reporting and verification components of AccVerify to launch a repair “wizard” interface, which prompts the user to correct accessibility errors. AccRepair also uses a library that “learns” as repairs are made. Corrections of the same error (for example, associating "alt-text" behind an image) need only be made once. The library then stores the corrected information and auto-corrects the images each time a page is encountered with that image.

AccRepair and AccVerify are available as integrated Microsoft FrontPage applications. Both products are also available as automated server-based solutions that minimize labor required to achieve and maintain accessible Web sites as new content is created.  

“AccRepair for FrontPage goes beyond merely identifying and correcting Web-based information. Often Web elements flagged by AccRepair are indicative of poor design. Ergo, AccRepair serves as both a design validation and quality assurance tool. Once we have repaired pages, we use those pages as templates for accessible new content, ” said Mr. Thergesen.

“The benefit of using an integrated verification and repair tool is that repairs can be immediately applied to affected content and the content can be immediately (re) published.”

The Bottom Line

Through the use of FrontPage and AccRepair for FrontPage, the CDE brought its site into compliance with accessibility standards. All HTML pages were repaired in one work-week, two weeks prior to the State-mandated repair deadline. “AccRepair is working extremely well for us. I made more progress in one week with repairs than in the previous four months since we were notified by the Governor's Office of the July 1 deadline for initiating compliance,” said Mr. Thergesen. The combined use of Microsoft FrontPage as a design tool with AccRepair for FrontPage to manage accessibility compliance has assisted in making this Web site usable by all.

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