Our approach to an equitable reading experience is to integrate accessibility into the design and development process – from the beginning. In addition, we perform daily, automated tests to validate accessibility and perform comprehensive full platform testing for each release.
RedShelf's Platform supports the use of assistive technologies that improve the functional capabilities of individuals with accessible needs. The Platform renders content compatible with common screen readers and is continuously being developed to support additional programs and maximize current compatibility.
In July 2020, RedShelf signed a three-year partnership agreement with Level Access, an accessibility consulting firm, to provide third-party auditing and testing support for our product suite. While our engineering and product teams take an accessibility-first approach when developing all of our digital products, having third-party testers with disabilities validating the user experience is essential for our products to be beneficial for all users.
Testing RedShelf eReader involved a combination of manual and functional testing. Level Access comprehensively tested a selection of pages representative of the RedShelf eReader, among other methodologies, JAWS 2020 and VoiceOver for OSX, exclusive use of the keyboard, and manual inspection of code and Accessibility API output. Level also functionally tested several user flows of RedShelf eReader, with JAWS 2020 screen reader, VoiceOver screen reader for OSX, ZoomText 2020 screen magnifier, and Dragon® NaturallySpeaking 15.5 speech recognition software.
For more information about accessibility at RedShelf or download our VPAT, visit the following link (opens in a new tab): redshelf.com/a11y