Just like BeyondTrust’s employees, our customers, partners, and potential customers are a diverse group of people across the globe with different communications needs, abilities, and expectations. One way we strive to ensure that we are meeting the needs of this diverse audience is by adhering to web accessibility best practices. Digital accessibility refers to how easy web pages, tools, and technologies are able to be understood and navigated by people with disabilities.
BeyondTrust is committed to inclusion of its customers, partners, and other application users with disabilities. We take proactive steps to ensure that our products adhere to the standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level AA via a third-party audit and internal training. WCAG 2.0 (the most current update of the standards) is a set of requirements and recommendations that specify how to make content accessible, primarily for people with disabilities. WCAG is broken down into three levels: A, AA, and AAA.
By redesigning existing content with these guidelines in mind and making continuous and conscious improvements to our future features, BeyondTrust is proud to work toward featuring content that is accessible to users of different abilities.
BeyondTrust Accessibility Initiatives
Our products have undergone accessibility audits by a third-party accessibility consulting firm, Accessibility Partners. This company used skilled accessibility testers with and without disabilities, coupled with assistive technologies and testing tools to evaluate the web accessibility of BeyondTrust products. To ensure that BeyondTrust received the most accurate results with respect to accessibility, the firm’s test engineers leveraged a combination of testers and assistive technologies to emulate a diverse set of experiences of users with disabilities.
The testing team (both with and without disabilities) executed WCAG 2.0 AA diagnostic testing on pages within the realm of the customer experiences. To achieve this, the Accessibility Partners team utilized assistive technologies, such as screen readers, screen magnification, and voice recognition software to evaluate the recommended technology solutions from the actual perspective of those with disabilities.
Based on the evaluation results and analysis performed by Accessibility Partners, we are implementing their recommendations to wholly increase the accessibility of our products’ experiences.
Here are some areas we are focusing on to help ensure our products are as easy to use as possible for all customers:
- Non-text Content: Images have alternative text that describes their purpose or meaning so that a person who cannot see the image can have the alternative text read aloud so that they know what it is and why it’s there.
- Info and Relationships: Structural markup is used according to its meaning, not because of the way it appears visually. Sighted users perceive structure and relationships through visual cues; for example, headings are often in a larger font, list items are preceded by a bullet and often indented, paragraphs are separated by a blank line, etc. Having these structures and relationships programmatically determined ensures that information important for comprehension will be perceivable to all users.
- No Keyboard Trap: The focus is able to be moved away from a component using only the keyboard. This ensures that people who rely on a keyboard do not have the keyboard focus get “trapped” within subsections of content.
- Bypass Blocks: A method is provided to allow keyboard users to bypass navigational or repetitive links to get to the main content. This allows users of all abilities to “ignore” blocks of content that are repeated on every page, such as navigation links and heading graphics. For example, screen reader users can avoid having to hear all heading graphics and dozens of navigation links on every page before the main content is spoken.
- Name, Role, Value: Controls can be identified by assistive technology. Providing role, state, and value information on all user interface components enables compatibility with assistive technology, such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, and speech recognition software, used by people with disabilities.
- Labels or Instructions: Labels or instructions are provided when content requires user input. Providing clear and unambiguous labels and instructions (including examples of expected data formats) helps all users to enter information correctly and can prevent users from making incomplete or incorrect submissions. This can particularly benefit those with cognitive, language, and learning disabilities.
Read documentation on how BeyondTrust products address accessibility here.
BeyondTrust Welcomes Your Questions & Feedback
BeyondTrust welcomes feedback on the accessibility of our products. Should you have further questions about accessibility or suggestions on how we can improve, please contact us. BeyondTrust’s WCAG 2.0 AA Accessibility Conformance Report (VPAT) is also available by request.
Angela Duggan, Director of User Experience
Angela is a user experience expert with almost 20 years of experience in the IT industry. As the Director of User Experience at BeyondTrust, Angela manages a growing team comprised of Researchers, Designers, Analysts, Information Architects, and UX Assurance Engineers. Angela oversees all aspects of BeyondTrust’s user experience strategy. She works closely with the Product Management, Marketing and Engineering teams to develop roadmaps, processes and goals surrounding user and customer experience for a large product portfolio. Angela has worked with several technology companies over her career to create, develop, and optimize user experience departments and processes. She started her career as a web developer and quickly moved into user experience specifically working with rich internet, desktop, and mobile applications. Angela's specialities include: leadership, advocating the importance of user experience, building strong relationships between UX and other departments, user interface design, interaction design, visual design, user research and requirement gathering.
