Accessibility roles and responsibilities

This topic introduces the roles and responsibilities of IBM® teams in accessibility testing of IBM Eclipse Help System.

IBM Eclipse Help System (IEHS) is the presentation format for online documentation. Thus, IBM teams that deliver documentation with IEHS can respond to the IBM Documentation Accessibility Checklist Checkpoint #1.

The IBM teams are providing their documentation in the accessible format, if the XHTML files and other content put into IEHS are also accessible.

The roles and responsibilities in accessibility testing are outlined in the following table.

Table 1. Accessibility testing roles and responsibilities
IBM Eclipse Help System Team Information Development Team IBM Product Team using IBM Eclipse Help System
IBM Eclipse Help System Team is responsible for the following items:
  • Ensuring that IEHS is tested according to the Web Accessibility Checklist.
  • Ensuring the generic How to use... documentation is tested according to the Documentation Accessibility Checklist.
  • Filling the Web Accessibility Checklist and Documentation Accessibility Checklist in the IBM AC Product Accessibility Database.
Information Development Team is responsible for the following items:
  • Filling out the Documentation Accessibility Checklist for their product.
  • In the Comment field for Checkpoint 1, stating that IEHS is used as the presentation vehicle, and providing the file formats of the content files that are being delivered within IEHS.
  • Ensuring that all the product documentation files supplied in IEHS are accessible to their customers according to the appropriate checklist. Common documentation file formats that the ID team supplies in the Help System are XHTML and PDF.
IBM Product Team is responsible for the following items:
  • When filing their product in the IBM AC Product Accessibility Database, they need to indicate, in the Bundling Information section of their product document, that their product bundles IEHS reusable components, so as to ensure all the checklists are connected to your product in the IBM AC Product Accessibility Database.

IBM Information Development (ID) Teams and IBM Product Teams do not need to test IEHS user interface for accessibility.

ID Teams need to be able to accurately respond to Checkpoint #1 of the Documentation Accessibility Checklist. To do this, they can take the following items into consideration:

You can find the information about how to get access to the IBM AC Product Accessibility Database at the IBM Accessibility Center (http://w3.ibm.com/able).