The purpose of this section is to indicate the level of accessibility support available in relation to the surveys produced in UNICOM Intelligence.

The following definition of web accessibility was obtained from the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3c.org):

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. Web accessibility also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging.

Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.

Much of the focus on Web accessibility has been on the responsibilities of Web developers. However, Web software also has a vital role in Web accessibility. Software needs to help developers produce and evaluate accessible Web sites, and be usable by people with disabilities.

One of the roles of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is to develop guidelines and techniques that describe accessibility solutions for Web software and Web developers. These WAI guidelines are considered the international standard for Web accessibility. There are three levels of conformance simply called A, Double-A (AA) and Triple-A (AAA). These are determined by prioritizing each accessibility check into one of three categories (Priorities 1, 2 and 3). For example: conformance level A contains just priority 1 requirements, conformance level double-A contains priority 1 and 2 requirements.

In 1998, US Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Inaccessible technology interferes with an individual’s ability to obtain and use information quickly and easily. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. In WAI terms 508 compliance for web accessibility is equivalent to Priority 1 compliance.

Part III of the Disability Discrimination Act refers to the provision of goods, facilities and services, although the act itself does not mention the delivery of any specific services the Code of Practice (PDF) for the act explicitly mentions websites. The statuary requirement level is not clear but they are equivalent to WAI conformance level A.

There is no specific legislation within European Law, however the eEurope 2002 Accessibility of Public Websites and their Content document indicates that double-A compliance is required.

Most other countries provide documents or laws that are equivalent to A or Double-A conformance. For more details of specific requirements please use the following link:

As the main purpose of the UNICOM Intelligence Suite is to create surveys that can be deployed in various modes including web and mobile web it is necessary that UNICOM Intelligence is able to allow customers to generate survey pages that conform to WAI level of compliance.

UNICOM Intelligence can produce Double-A conforming surveys. There is no plan to produce Triple-A conforming programs. Testing of conformance is performed using tools such as the JAWS browser and IBM’s A-Browser.

UNICOM Intelligence approach to publishing surveys is very different to most of its competitors. To ensure that greatest amount of flexibility within a survey, UNICOM Intelligence creates each survey page as it is required, this allows it to incorporate responses to previous questions and to merge in information regarding the specific respondent. This means that it would not be possible to manually adjust pages of the survey after they have been rendered as they are rendered in real-time.

UNICOM Intelligence works by taking pre-built HTML templates (which can refer to other web orientated files such as Javascript scripts, images and cascading style sheets) and inserting HTML into them to render the specific page. The HTML templates are created by the users and so can be built and checked for accessibility compliance.

The HTML generated by UNICOM Intelligence (which is inserted into the templates) is tested for A and Double-A conformance during each release cycle. This ensures that the content generated by UNICOM Intelligence is compliant. Due to the fact, however, that customers generate their own HTML wrappers for surveys and include custom HTML within their surveys UNICOM Systems, Inc. is unable to guarantee that each survey published is fully compliant.

Consequently UNICOM Systems, Inc. strongly recommends that customers test their surveys before distribution to ensure conformance.