Transcript for Accessible Job Postings on Your Website?
Hi. My name is Kim Testa, and I'm a Senior Executive here at the Bureau of Internet Accessibility. And what we're going to talk about today is on most websites, there are career areas or job areas where the public can come and apply for an opportunity within your organization. Many times these career areas on websites are used or are presented by third party applications.
So companies that this is what they specialize in. So you take their application, it's embedded in your website, and that's how you would get applicants to apply for opportunities However, what we found is that many, many of these applications are not compliant and they're not accessible so that you are preventing people of any ability from applying for an opportunity.
You may not be doing it on purpose, obviously, but there are applications out there that because they're not compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA, that is preventing them. So what we did for you today is we gathered up a list of about 15 recruiting applications and we ran all of them through our automated scanning tool. And what we found are the results that I'm going to review with you today.
So when we gathered all of them up, we put all of their results together and that's what you're going to you're looking at right now. So with digital automated scanning, any scan out there, it has the ability to test a maximum of 30% of the checkpoints. It just can't. It can only go so far. It's a computer.
So what we were able to do is test 29 of them. Those are the ones that were on these applications and websites. And these are the results. So 15 of the checkpoints passed, which is always positive. But we found that across the board on all of these, they were, there were 14 that did not pass. When we gathered all their results up, we put everything together in a results summary for you. And we broke everything down based on the four principles of WCAG. The first one is Perceivable. This is all about the non-text content. So your images, hrefs, any multimedia that you may have on that application or on that website. And then we the what we found are these the failed checkpoints.
These are all common denominators throughout every single one of these sites. So non-context. So missing a lot of alt text on images. Info and relationships. So a lot of this is preventing someone from applying. The second one is Operable. This is all about navigation. Can someone using assistive technology navigate through the website? Can they navigate using a keyboard or any of the other input methods?
But the timing bypass blocks. These are all things that an automated scan can find. And typically when we see all of these, there are many, many more that will be found when manual testing is done. The third principle is Understandable. This is making sure that what you have on that UI side needs to appear and operate in predictable ways within the code.
That's how assistive technology works. So, for example, and I'm going to assume that everybody has their vision on this call, but what we're looking at is a table, and it's a table that reads vertically. So it's important that it's coded that way so that anybody using, for example, a screen reader, even keyboard nav, that they're able to navigate through there, through whatever the table is saying.
So it would have to be coded, you know, title, image, image description, paragraph, title and then links but with descriptions as well so that they can have that and acquire the same information as a sighted person or someone that is not using keyboard nav And then the last one is Robust. This is all about keeping up with user agents and assistive technologies.
So as everything is evolving you need to make sure that your websites are keeping up with it. Now, these results once again are from about 15 of the recruiting websites. So you want to make sure that anyone that you're using, that you're asking them if they are compliant and maybe even get a vpat from them just to make sure that their application that you're using on your website is compliant.
Because you definitely don't want to discriminate against anyone from applying for a job. The next thing within this report, what we're able to provide is a comparison of the recruiting industry to other industries and what they've found. So as you can see in the recruiting results compared to education, finance, etc.. And that's what each one of these will represent, all based on the four principles of WCAG. And then finally, what we've done, we've blurred out the URLs just to keep an anonymity in here.
But here are some of the results of the big ones that we found. So image based alternative text, the easiest ones that you can correct. We'll tell you what the issue is, where the issue is and in the suggested remediation in our reports. But this will give you an idea of how these reports are presented. Field elements. This is an interesting one because as you can see, it impacts four of the different check points which is, you know, you fix this issue and all of these may go away, but you have to be careful with that as well.
But this one issue across the board is impacting four different checkpoints. Empty HTML list elements. This is another common one that we do see. And once again, within our reports, we'll tell you what the issue is. Snippets of the code of where that issue is and the suggested remediation And to summarize all of this, as you can see based on these results of these 15 websites.
There's a lot that needs to be fixed. And it's important that you think of this when you are using these recruiting application/websites, that you understand and you know in that you're aware that there are a lot of issues and you want to make sure that you investigate it so that when you put anything on your website to use for recruiting that they are compliant and you have that documentation from them, such as a vpat.
I hope you found this helpful. And thank you very much.
