In keeping with our commitment to be a platform for everyone and a good partner to both our current organizational members and those who wish to join us, the Knowledge Commons team recently completed two important reports: the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) and the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT). Taken together these reports detail our accessibility (VPAT) and our cybersecurity, privacy, and compliance standards (HECVAT). While the VPAT reports – one for the main Knowledge Commons website (WordPress-based) and one for KCWorks (InvenioRDM-based) – are publicly available on our About site, the HECVAT (version 3 lite) is provided to potential partners who seek to establish their own Commons within our network. Both of these reports required a great deal of work to complete, and we wanted to give our users a glimpse into the efforts we’ve made and what this means for the future of our platform. 

The VPAT

Bonnie Russell, our Product Manager, took the lead on the VPAT. Knowledge Commons team members Stephanie E. Vasko, Larissa Babak, Grant Eben, Martin Paul Eve, and Dimitri Tzouris, as well as Evidence Driven Learning Innovation (EDLI)  team member Imari Tetu (CPAAC), also took part in the testing and evaluation of both the main site and KCWorks. As a team, we used a number of tools along with manual testing to evaluate the site against the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and focus on making the web accessible to all centered around the principles of Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). 

The VPAT is a moment in time, capturing where the platform is as of February 2025. While we are not fully compliant with the standard, this report shines a light on where the issues are, allowing us to develop a roadmap to remediate as many of the issues as possible. Because we are built on two platforms, WordPress (KC) and InvenioRDM (KCWorks), there are issues that exist in the core platforms that we cannot remedy on our own. For those issues we will ensure that if they have not yet been raised by the platform developers we will do so. 

Disability by the Numbers

The Commons makes its home at Michigan State University in the United States, so we’ll use the US population as an example. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 1 in 4 people in the US have some form of disability. Most people at some point in their lives will experience some form of disability, whether temporary or permanent. Some important statistics to remember when thinking about accessibility and the web: 

• “13.9 percent of U.S. adults have a cognition disability with serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions.” This can include dyslexia, dyscalculia, brain injury, and stroke.
• “12.2 percent of U.S. adults have a mobility disability with serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs.” This can also impact the ability to use a keyboard and/or mouse.
• “6.2 percent of U.S. adults are deaf or have serious difficulty hearing.” This affects the ability to consume audio and video content without captions or transcripts.
• “5.5 percent of U.S. adults have a vision disability with blindness or serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses.” This affects the ability to consume visual content and video without adequate description, and navigating content on the web using screen readers.”

Taking visual impairment as an example, 5.5% doesn’t sound like a large number until you consider that the US population is (as of 24 February 2025) 341,383,352. That means that roughly 18,776,084 people in the US have some level of visual impairment. Making sure text is large enough, has enough contrast, and is organized in an easy to navigate way ensures that all can participate and engage in our work. 

VPAT Outcomes

We know that we are not alone in falling short with all aspects of the WCAG 2.1 AA standard on the first pass. There may also be recognized exemptions that may need to take place depending on the technologies used and the functionality desired. Our major issues on both the main Knowledge Commons site and KCWorks include color contrast (primarily links and buttons), a number of barriers when navigating from the top menu to the main site on certain pages using keyboard navigation, missing image and audio descriptions (video) for visually impaired users, and using correct header order within pages to support those using screen readers. 

We have a remediation plan in place and will work throughout 2025 to fix most of these major issues. Ensuring that accessibility is part of the design and build process is termed “shifting left.” Our entire team has been engaged in accessibility training, and are committed to ensuring that everything we build from now on will be built to the WCAG 2.1 AA standard from the outset by starting at the design stage.  For us this involves not only a recognition of the importance of ensuring that all are able to join our community and use our tools, but a commitment to our own values.