Description of Evaluation Criteria
Determination of Importance
The IT Accessibility Policy Framework uses two criteria, Sufficiency and Importance, to evaluate agency policies for ICT accessibility language. These criteria, applied in combination across your agency’s policy directive, allow you to holistically determine which policies have the greatest need of remediation.
Sufficiency
The Sufficiency criteria is used to evaluate the adequacy of required Section 508 language within a given policy. A rating is assessed based on whether or not the policy is deficient with respect to the ICT accessibility requirements/information that you would expect in that document. To determine the Sufficiency rating for a given policy, consider searching for ICT accessibility keywords, assessing its scope, and identifying the paragraph(s) that contain ICT accessibility language.
- Fully Sufficient: Contains all relevant ICT accessibility requirements.
- Mostly Sufficient: Contains most ICT accessibility requirements; missing minor, non-critical accessibility elements.
- Somewhat Sufficient: Generally has some ICT accessibility language; missing a few critical elements or several non-critical ICT accessibility elements.
- Inadequate, Contains Some ICT Accessibility Language: Has limited ICT accessibility language; missing several vital ICT accessibility elements/requirements.
- Essential Accessibility Information Missing: Fully insufficient, missing most/all ICT accessibility language; missing most/all critical ICT accessibility-related requirements or language.
Importance
Importance is a composite of two criteria, Relevance and Level of Detail, which are described below. The determination of overall Importance with respect to accessibility considerations based on ratings from these two sub-criteria is then summarized.
Relevance
The Relevance criteria is used to evaluate the alignment of subject matter to ICT accessibility. A rating is given to a policy to determine its importance to ICT accessibility.
- Highly Relevant: Policy is fully related to ICT accessibility considerations or is an ICT accessibility policy in and of itself.
- Relevant: ICT accessibility is integral to the execution or definition of this policy; policy should include multiple ICT accessibility requirements/considerations.
- Somewhat Relevant: ICT accessibility is somewhat important to the execution or definition of this policy; policy should include several ICT accessibility requirements.
- Not Very Relevant: ICT accessibility is tangentially related to this policy; policy requires a few ICT accessibility requirements.
- Not Relevant: Policy is not related to ICT accessibility; no ICT accessibility requirements should or need to be included in the policy.
Level of Detail
The Level of Detail criteria is used to classify the type of a policy and its intended use (i.e., strategic vs. tactical).
- Organizational Purpose/Governing Guidelines: Policy is an overarching governance document for the agency that mostly specifies the need for creation of additional policies, rules and/or directives (Strategic Level Document).
- Office Rules, Policy, and Directive: Primary documents that define goals and high level ways of working (Operational Level Document).
- Operational Guidance/Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): Tactical level documents that generally provide specific instructions to execute tasks (Tactical Level Document).
Determination of Importance
Determination of Importance The Importance rating can be determined by interpreting and combining the ratings for Relevance and Level of Detail. On the next page, Table 1 illustrates this approach through an exhaustive list of conditional statements, in which ratings for Relevance and Level of Detail serve as the conditions (i.e., the “if” part of the statement) and the Importance ratings serve as the outcomes (i.e. the “then” part of the statement). Note that Table 1 is sorted first by Importance, then by Relevance, and last by Level of Detail.
