Join Natalie and Natalie for the fifth episode of the AAArdvark Accessibility Podcast, where they discuss the different types of accessibility certifications. We’ll also chat about the fees, maintenance, and training involved with each.
Natalie Garza: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the fifth episode of the Aardvark Accessibility Podcast. Today we have Natalie MacLees. She is an accessibility expert to talk about the different certifications in accessibility. And I’m your host, Natalie Garza, an accessibility novice. So, Natalie, I’m glad to have you join us today.
Do you have any words to start us off?
Natalie MacLees: Hi, Natalie. Thanks for having me. Natalie and Natalie at it again.
Natalie Garza: Natalie, Natalie, at it again. For the AAArdvark 5th episode. Make sure to check out our 4th episode. Alright, so, let’s kick off this podcast. What are the different types of certifications? Do you want to start with the first category?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. Well, I think before I start going into them, I think I do want to address that in most cases there’s not really a single industry-accepted certification for accessibility. So it’s a little bit of a wild, wild west right now, but we can talk about a few organizations that are offering them and what that means and what it looks like.
Uh, so one of the first ones, and I think the one that most people are familiar with these days, is from the IAAP, the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.
They’re a relatively new organization that was created at an accessibility conference called CSUN. It’s a pretty well-established accessibility conference.
And the organization was formed just because of this problem: there was no industry-accepted certification. And so they were created just to try to create that.
They have established a handful of certifications. I think they’re working on even more. And they administer the testing. And it’s through them that you would maintain your certification.
I can’t say that they have been really accepted as the industry-standard certification at this point. And a lot of accessibility professionals who’ve been practicing for a long time actually don’t like it and refuse to get their IAAP certification. But everybody has a different opinion.
I chose to get mine because I think it’s important to support that effort. I think it’s an important goal that they have. And I think I wanted to demonstrate my support for it, even if there are some things about it that could be better. I think that’s probably always the case for a certification.
So they offer a handful of different ones. The most basic one would be CPACC or C P A C C, which has a really long name, so you have to call it CPACC.
It is Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies, and that is the most basic one. It’s not a technical certification at all. It’s just really focused on: here are the different kinds of disabilities and how they can impact people’s use of digital technology. And here are all the different laws around the world that apply to it. So it’s not at all a technical certification.
Then there’s WAS, which is a Web Accessibility Specialist, and that is hands-on for front-end developers mainly. It’s a very HTML-focused course and test.
And then if you get both of those, if you get both CPACC and WAS, then you automatically get this bonus third certification, which is CPWA, a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility. And it’s not a separate test. It’s not separate classes or anything. That one just says you have these other two.
Which is a little bit weird that there’s a separate one that’s just made up of two others, but that’s okay.
And then their newest one that they just introduced, I think, a year or two ago is the ADS, or the Accessible Document Specialist, because trying to test and remediate PDFs and other types of documents is a whole specialty all on its own and is way more complicated than you might suspect.
And so they have that separate certification now just for that one. The certifications through them are a little bit pricey. First, you’re probably going to end up having to pay for a course to study for it.
It is pretty difficult to try to study all of the course material from free resources. It’s kind of hard. You have to be really good at research and kind of putting that all together.
So they have a handful of educational courses that they endorse that you can pay for, and they’re pretty reasonably priced. But then you also have to pay to take the test, and it’s quite expensive to pay to take the test. It’s around $500.
And then, of course, if you don’t pass, you have to pay to take it a second time. So I think they do give you a discount in that case, but it’s still very pricey.
And when I did my tests—I think they do them more remotely now—but I had to go to a corporate testing center to take my tests.
And so you’re in this weird environment, not your own computer, and for some reason, they give you two sheets of paper and a pencil. Like just two sheets of blank paper and a pencil that I’m not exactly sure what those are for, but they give them to you.
So those are the certifications through the IAAP. Do you have any questions about those?
Natalie Garza: Um, I had some in mind, but I forgot them now. I need to start writing.
Natalie MacLees: Did I distract you with the two sheets of paper and a pencil?
Natalie Garza: Yeah, it reminds me of, like… what are those, like, state-mandated tests before you go into college?
Natalie MacLees: Like the SATs?
Natalie Garza: Yeah, the SATs. Now they’re… you have to go to this random campus, take those.
Natalie MacLees: It is like that. Yeah, it feels very much like that. And, you know, the testing center, they do all kinds of tests for all different kinds of companies, right? So all the people who work there don’t know anything about the tests you’re taking. They just follow, they get this little set of instructions, which for these tests, for some reason, tells them to give you two sheets of paper and a pencil.
Natalie Garza: Oh my God, you’re gonna write down your HTML notes. You’re like, “Aria-label, okay, got it.”
Natalie MacLees: Right? It’s not like you’re doing mathematical calculations.
Natalie Garza: That’s goofy. Um, I don’t have any questions right now. I think we can continue, and I’ll try to remember, and I’ll write them down.
On pen and paper if I had one.
Natalie MacLees: Sure. Um, I think we did want to touch on that you can, separately from the tests and certifications, you can also purchase a membership to IAAP. Um, and there are different levels of membership. You can join as an individual or as a company. I don’t know—there’s four or five different ones—but the individual one starts at around $200 a year, and I think they also have a discounted one for students.
Um, but it gets you access to—they have a library of accessibility training courses that you get access to, and you get a certain number of them for free with your membership. And then you also get access to a community of other IAAP members. You also get a little badge, like a little badge that you can display on your website or whatever, saying that you belong to IAAP and support their mission.
You do also get a discount on the testing fee. If you take a test, you get—I think it was like 20% off or something like that—on the tests if you have a membership.
One challenge with the IAAP certifications is that they have very strict continuing education requirements.
I want to say it was somewhere in the range of 40 to 50 continuing education credits required to maintain your certification.
The alternative would be to just keep taking the test every time your certification expires. You could go back and take the test. But of course, that’s very expensive.
So my certifications have actually lapsed because I could not keep up with those continuing education credits. I just didn’t have time to do that many hours of coursework.
They did count things like giving talks at conferences, but I just… I can’t give that many of them. You only got two hours of credit for giving a one-hour talk, which is a little bit frustrating because, of course, it takes 40 hours or more to actually prepare for a talk.
So that is not the most efficient way to maintain your continuing education credits. But yes, I found them very challenging to keep up with, so I might have to retake the tests and then see what I can do about maintaining those continuing education requirements.
Natalie Garza: When I say hours of coursework, where are these courses coming from? Like, what counts?
Natalie MacLees: IAAP has some courses themselves that you can do. If you’re a member, you get access to a certain number of them for free.
They also have some other organizations that have made classes, like Deque, for example, that are approved by IAAP. You can take those courses.
The Trusted Tester certification that we’re going to talk about in a second is actually on their approved list. If you do the Trusted Tester certification, that counts toward your continuing education credits.
You can also submit other things, like if you take a class at a community college or something like that, you can submit it to them for them to review and approve for your continuing education credits.
Natalie Garza: Kind of sounds like the certification never ends.
Natalie MacLees: It never ends. It never ends. And it’s a good thing. They have a good intention there, because technology is changing all the time. Websites are changing all the time. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript change.
So they’re trying to make sure that your knowledge stays up to date. It’s good intentions. It’s just very… it’s pretty onerous right now to try to maintain that.
So you have to get a good balance there of “it’s enough to keep you up to date,” but it’s not so much that it feels impossible to keep up with.
Natalie Garza: Yeah. Do audits count towards… like your work in auditing, does that count towards the hours?
Natalie MacLees: No.
Natalie Garza: No?
Natalie MacLees: No, it doesn’t.
Natalie Garza: I think that would be a good way to kind of keep up with it. Because as you do work in your certification, it should count.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, like I said, if you’re giving a talk at a conference, that will count, but only for a couple of hours. But no, just showing up and doing an accessibility job every day does not count.
Natalie Garza: Natalie, does this podcast count?
Natalie MacLees: I don’t know. We’d have to submit it to them to see.
Natalie Garza: You know, ten episodes of the Accessibility Podcast.
Natalie MacLees: Anyway, continue down the list.
Natalie Garza: Trusted Tester certification?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, so I think we touched on this a little bit last week. This is a course and certification offered by the Department of Homeland Security here in the United States. It does very specifically train you to test websites and web applications for compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
It is a very challenging course to get through. It is many hours of studying and practice exercises. Then there’s a practice test and a final test at the end. I think you have to get a pretty good score on the practice test to be able to continue to the final test. And then you need, I think it’s like a 95% score on the final test to actually get the certification.
So, it’s a pretty challenging one to get. What’s good about it is that it’s free. Anybody can go onto the Department of Homeland Security website, sign up, and start taking the course, the practice test, and the final test. None of that costs any money. It just costs you hours and hours of your life.
Natalie Garza: There’s nothing truly free, is there?
Natalie MacLees: No. It is a very, very thorough course, and it is also a very opinionated course. Right? Because it’s just… it’s an automated test done through a computer. So, no human ever reviews your results, and if you disagree with whether or not alt text on an image was appropriate, there’s nobody to take that up with.
You just have to do whatever they have programmed the test to accept as an answer.
Natalie Garza: I see. So you have to memorize what they gave you in the practice test?
Natalie MacLees: It’s not even… it’s too much to even memorize. It’s not even that. The way that the test works is actually kind of interesting. They give you a website to do an audit on. You do your audit and record all of the issues that you found, and then you submit it. It will come back and tell you, “Oh, you found only 40 of the 50 issues that were on this website.”
I think you actually get three tries to go back and find the other issues that you failed to identify the first time. But they can be anything. So it’s really challenging. And even just doing the test itself takes several hours.
Natalie Garza: I see. Aside from alt text, are there other success criteria that are kind of biased or driven by opinions?
Natalie MacLees: Oh, there’s quite a lot of them, actually. If you follow some accessibility professionals online, you’ll see they very often get into debates about what is or is not accepted and what does or does not pass.
To the best of our ability as an industry, we try to resolve those things on objective data from real users. But of course, that’s not always available on five minutes’ notice for a very specific type of issue.
We do try to look at what affects real users. The other frustrating thing is that something that’s good for, say, screen reader users might actually be frustrating or annoying for users with cognitive disabilities. Or something that’s great for users who are deaf might be annoying or create some kind of barrier for users with a different kind of disability.
So there’s not even a clear answer across everyone. People with disabilities are not a monolith who all have the exact same needs. So there’s a lot of room for gray areas and subjectivity sometimes with accessibility.
Natalie Garza: Which makes a blanket test like the Trusted Tester really difficult.
Natalie MacLees: And really frustrating. There were times, when I was working on it, that I just flat-out disagreed with what the test was saying was the correct answer for something.
That’s what you get when you have computers testing people.
Natalie Garza: But it’s free.
Natalie MacLees: Free.
Natalie Garza: You can do this one?
Natalie MacLees: Free of charge. Yeah, it’s a good test. People are always in different situations in their life. I would say Trusted Tester is a good test if you’ve got more time than money. If you have more money than time, maybe the IAAP certifications might be better. There’s still quite a lot of studying that needs to be done for those, but it is significantly less than the Trusted Tester.
Natalie Garza: Okay, I wrote down my question really quick, but…
Natalie MacLees: Okay.
Natalie Garza: Continue.
Natalie MacLees: Sure.
Natalie Garza: One more?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, there’s just one more that I know of. It’s possible that there are many others because I don’t know everything.
The Web Accessibility Initiative, which is the W3C (the organization that creates the WCAG guidelines), has a course called Fundamentals of Accessibility that is free to take.
It is free to take the class, and you can get a certificate at the end. You do have to pay for the certificate, but it’s quite affordable. I think it’s around $100. I signed up just to look at the course and see what was involved in it, and they sent me a coupon code for like 20% off, too.
Possibly, you don’t even have to pay the full fee. You do have to get a passing score to get your certificate, but it’s not like the Trusted Tester. I think it’s 70% or 80% that you need to pass, which is pretty reasonable.
The Trusted Tester is really difficult because it does require such a high passing score, but this one seems more reasonable.
I would say it’s roughly equivalent to the CPACC from IAAP. It’s not super technical, hands-on, or digging into a lot of code, but it’s a good overview of accessibility.
Natalie Garza: So, it’s kind of still good enough to conduct audits, though, right?
Natalie MacLees: The Fundamentals of Accessibility… the state of California seems to think so.
That is one of the ones they’re thinking of accepting for that new law they keep fighting over. For me personally, no, I don’t think that’s enough to learn to do audits. That is one of the certifications the state of California is saying they’ll accept.
But no, because it’s just a broad overview of what accessibility is, what the different kinds of disabilities are. It doesn’t dig into specifics like HTML markup, how to use ARIA, or different things like that. It doesn’t get into any of that.
Natalie Garza: I see. Do you feel like it’s equivalent to the IAAP ones? Like the CPACC—do you think it’s enough to conduct a thorough audit?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, I would say it’s about the same as a CPACC.
Natalie Garza: So, if somebody is searching for an auditor, your personal recommendation is that they have the CPWA?
Natalie MacLees: That’s a good place to start. But because there are so many very experienced accessibility professionals who refuse to get their IAAP certification, I wouldn’t make that a hard and fast requirement.
It can be a good indicator that this is somebody who has demonstrated their knowledge on an objective test, right? So that could be a good thing to look for. But I wouldn’t rule somebody out just because they didn’t have that, because we don’t have an industry standard certification yet.
They’re handy shortcuts if you’re looking to hire somebody, but it’s difficult to say you should always have that.
Natalie Garza: I see. But for Section 508, you are mandated to do a Trusted Tester, correct?
Natalie MacLees: If you want to do that testing for a government agency, you have to have that certification.
If you want to do Section 508 testing for somebody who is just providing software or a product to the government, you don’t have to have that certification.
Natalie Garza: I see. Do you have any last comments, Natalie?
Natalie MacLees: Uh, no, I don’t think so.
Natalie Garza: Do you want to let them know what certifications you’ve gotten?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah. So, I had the CPACC, the WAS, and the CPWA through the IAAP. I did not maintain them, so I am lapsed on those right now.
I have to decide if I want to retake those tests and if I think it would be feasible for me to maintain the continuing education. But those were the ones that I had.
Natalie Garza: And for someone who wants to get started, which one would you recommend?
Natalie MacLees: For somebody who is brand new to accessibility and just thinking about it, I would probably, honestly, get started with the free course from the WAI.
You can get into it, learn a little bit more about accessibility, and make sure it’s something you like at no cost. I think it’s only about 20 hours to do that course. It’s self-guided—you just do it on your own time. That would be a great place to get started for somebody who is brand new.
Natalie Garza: Ha ha ha. I think that should wrap up our episode. It was a longer one, but it was jam-packed with information.
Natalie MacLees: Full to the brim.
Natalie Garza: Full to the brim, overflowing. Thank you so much, Natalie. It’s always a pleasure. Now it’s time to go over where to get started. Where do we get started with all this accessibility stuff?
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, well, if you have a website and you’re wondering if it’s accessible, you can come test your homepage for free at aaardvarkaccessibility.com.
Just plug in your URL, and we’ll scan it, look for any accessibility issues, and guide you through fixing them.
Natalie Garza: And if you are someone who wants to get started and look into the certifications, start training, AAArdvark is also a great place to get started.
Natalie MacLees: Ha ha.
Natalie Garza: Enter any website on the internet, and get a peek at some automated issues that come up for them.
Natalie MacLees: Yeah, compare and contrast.
Natalie Garza: So that basically wraps up our episode.
