OpenACR

OVERVIEW

Section 508 requires that the federal government procure, create, use, and maintain information communications technology (ICT) that is accessible to people with disabilities, regardless of whether or not they work for the federal government.

Currently, accessibility is evaluated at the procurement level through an archaic process using Microsoft Word Conformance Templates and PDFs.

OpenACR strives to:

• Make the process of maintaining Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACRs) automatic and machine readable.
• Make it easier to compare the accessibility of two products so that procurement officers can make informed decisions.
• Create a repository of ACRs so that work to assess the accessibility of the product doesn’t need to be repeated across agencies. This will ultimately make the process of procurement faster and more efficient.

As the only product designer on my cross-functional team, I was responsible for the end-to-end design process. I interviewed stakeholders, created wireframes and final design mocks, provided QA feedback, helped troubleshoot front-end code, and advocated for resources to add a content designer to the project.

Project Overview

Formstack empowers anyone to quickly and easily build custom forms without any specialized skills or coding. But in order to achieve the same level of customization once the data is collected, customers needed to be complex technical skills to stitch together third-party integrations.

How can we change the way procurement is done across the federal government, and convince both procurement officers and vendors to adopt a new format?

How can we change the way procurement is done across the federal government, and convince both procurement officers and vendors to adopt a new format?

RESEARCH

Process

There is a lot of variability in the procurement process. It quickly became clear to me that this variability was hindering our ability to design a user-centric workflow and explain the benefits of OpenACR to procurement officers who might be hesitant to add yet another step to their procurement process. To gain a better understanding of the process and all of the key people involved in the process, I created a process map and a stakeholder map. I collaborated with and gathered input from our own in-house procurement experts, our agency stakeholders, and other accessibility experts who work on federal government projects.

The PM on this project was also the PM for the group that ran training sessions for procurement officers. During the training we asked the group if they knew about Section508. Out of 30 people, only two of them had heard of Section508 and only one could confidently define it. 

There are two things to note:

• The procurement process is different for every agency.
• The procurement process can be different for different budget ranges.
  

RESEARCH

Process

To find customers who might be interested in the feature, I spoke with Sales and Customer Experience. I also searched our ideas site for feature requests related to pdfs. 

I interviewed 6 stakeholders from Customer Experience, Sales, and the Product team and I collaborated with my Product Manager to conduct 23 user interviews in two weeks. I investigated the pdf export feature at 8 competitors.

Findings

My research showed that the feature should focus on:

• Give customers with more control over customization
• Improve the style format 
of the pdf
• Improve the experience of using integrations

Takeaways

Even with the above caveats and assumptions, there were some key insights that the mapping illustrated.

• There are several points in the process where the vendor will collaborate either with different departments within their team or with outside accessibility experts.
  • For security reasons, OpenACR stores information locally not in the cloud, making collaboration more difficult.
• There are several points in the process where the procurement and contracting officers collaborate.
• Getting procurement officers to adapt this new format and requesting it will involve convincing them that it is better and makes their job easier.
  • We decided to organize the information on the website by roles so that procurement officers and vendors could find information relevant to them.
• We had previously assumed procurement officers knew a lot more about accessibility than they actually did. The website would need to define basic terms to convince them to use OpenACR.

RESEARCH

Process

To find customers who might be interested in the feature, I spoke with Sales and Customer Experience. I also searched our ideas site for feature requests related to pdfs. 

I interviewed 6 stakeholders from Customer Experience, Sales, and the Product team and I collaborated with my Product Manager to conduct 23 user interviews in two weeks. I investigated the pdf export feature at 8 competitors.

Findings

My research showed that the feature should focus on:

• Give customers with more control over customization
• Improve the style format 
of the pdf
• Improve the experience of using integrations

KEY OUTCOMES

Learnings

Before working on this project, I had limited experience implementing accessibility best practices in a live project. I had led the design effort on the WCAG team at Formstack, but I had limited interaction with our third-party accessibility experts. For OpenACR and as part of the Accessibility work group at CivicActions, I worked with and spoke to accessibility experts every week. It was a crash course in accessibility best practices.

KEY OUTCOMES

Control

Customers can customize the fields that appear in the export and can add a logo to their export.

Style

The overall style of the export looks professional and modern with more efficient use of space, better page breaks, and maintains the information hierarchy of the form.

Integration

All fields are available to integrations making it easier for customers to set up since there is 1:1 parity. 

Metrics

We decreased the complexity of the language used to talk about OpenACRs and where possible removed unfamiliar acronymns and overall made the language on the website and the web tool more user-friendly.

Since the use of OpenACR has not yet been required by the federal government, we don't yet have much data on how much time it saves or whether it will improve accessibility in the federal government. But anecdotally, we have received positive feedback from the US Access Board, several Accessibility subject matter experts, and some advocacy groups who have tried the tool.

KEY OUTCOMES

Control

Customers can customize the fields that appear in the export and can add a logo to their export.

Style

The overall style of the export looks professional and modern with more efficient use of space, better page breaks, and maintains the information hierarchy of the form.

Integration

All fields are available to integrations making it easier for customers to set up since there is 1:1 parity. 

Success

The project was going so well that the client has decided to expand the project to incorporate more parts of Section508.gov. However, this required a change in the funding source and the stakeholder had to create a new Request for Proposals. This can be a months-long process.

KEY OUTCOMES

Control

Customers can customize the fields that appear in the export and can add a logo to their export.

Style

The overall style of the export looks professional and modern with more efficient use of space, better page breaks, and maintains the information hierarchy of the form.

Integration

All fields are available to integrations making it easier for customers to set up since there is 1:1 parity.