Update: 12 February 2007, Support-EAM.
Table of contents
The CEN Workshop on Web Accessibility Conformance was one of the activity undertaken by Support EAM. To get a global idea of Support EAM and how this CEN Workshop was related to other activites, please read the Support EAM booklet.
Support-EAM launched and conducted a CEN Workshop which produced a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA n° 15554:2006). This agreement has been published by the CEN as a first level European agreement on how standard conformity assessment schemes commonly used in Europe can apply to Web Accessibility conformity assessment. This CWA can be downloaded from the CEN Workshop Web site at: http://www.cenorm.be/cenorm/businessdomains/businessdomains/isss/cwa/design+for+all+in+ict.asp.
This agreement reflects three types of demands that were identified, namely supplier's declaration of conformity (according to ISO/IEC 17050), inspection (according to ISO/IEC 17020) and product certification (according to EN 45011) (Figure 1). Supplier's declaration of conformity is supported by industry groups like EICTA , while inspection seems very close to the existing labelling schemes. The agreement also proposes a reasonable way for existing labelling schemes to improve and to harmonise.
An important recommendation of this workshop is the creation of a central European institute whose mission is to organise, harmonise and control practices in liaison with international bodies concerned. The activities proposed to the institute concerning the operation of the scheme are:
The discussions that conducted to this agreement are reported in details in the deliverable D3.3 “Editing Work for the CEN Workshop” that can be downloaded from the Web at : http://www.support-eam.org/supporteam/About_Supporteam/Documents.asp.
[D]
Figure 1 illustrates one possible scheme for certifying the conformity
of a Web site to accessibility specification based on third party inspection
Based on the different studies already mentioned, the Support-EAM project proposes a strategy for implementing the recommendations of the CEN Workshop. This strategy is coherent with the experience of partners in various countries, including those where labelling schemes are in operation. It is organised in 6 major steps :
The project elaborated a concrete documentation for helping people in the creation of such a scheme, like:
The description of this strategy for implementing a Web Accessibility conformity assessment scheme and the supporting documentation are compiled in the report CWA Implementation Plan (D3.4 Support-EAM deliverable).