According to Web Accessibility in Mind, about 1 in 4 people have a disability. Many of these individuals are fully capable of succeeding in demanding professional roles. Yet if government and certification exams aren’t designed to be accessible, these potential leaders could be shut out of the job market.
As awareness and legislation around accessibility grows, digital accessibility is no longer just a nice-to-have. It’s a necessity.
In this article, we explain the importance of accessibility in government and certification exams, and the reputational, regulatory, and procedural risks of inaccessible systems.
Why Digital Accessibility is no Longer Optional
Digital accessibility is a growing concern around the world. Courts in the United States, Europe, and the UK have made it clear that laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the European Accessibility Act (EAA), and the Equality Act (EA) apply to websites and other digital platforms, too.
Fines and penalties can be substantial. For example, in the United States, non-compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) can result in fines reaching up to $150,000 under the ADA. And exam providers facing formal appeals processes and mandatory remediation are often under special scrutiny.
In addition to regulatory mandates, poor accessibility is a reputational risk. For instance, over two-thirds of disabled customers will click away from a website they find difficult to use, according to a survey by Click-Away Pound.
Though government-mandated certifications can’t be ignored in the way an online store can, they still depend on public trust. If a significant proportion of exam takers have trouble completing your test simply because it’s poorly designed, that harms your reputation as a credential provider. Moreover, accessibility is increasingly built into audit requirements and public-sector procurement criteria, meaning gaps can have significant implications for vendor approval.
After all, if private companies can meet WCAG best practices, so should trusted certification bodies.
What Accessibility Means for High-Stakes Exams
In high-accountability environments in which exam outcomes affect careers, licensure, or even immigration status, defensibility is paramount. Exam providers need to show why they issued, or chose not to issue, credentials to each candidate. Often, they need to keep records for years in case their credentials are challenged.
It’s easy to see why. If a hospital hires a nurse only to find that she can’t remember the mechanisms of action of common cardiovascular medications, her managers would be right to question her credentials. If they follow up with the credentialing institution, there had better be a clear and defensible evidence trail. If there isn’t, then the institution will lose all credibility.
Yet, when it comes to accessibility, the opposite applies. If an individual with a disability has the knowledge and skills needed to be a nurse, only to be denied a credential because they were not able to navigate the assessment interface, an injustice has occurred.
To drive the point home, not only has the would-be nurse missed out on a career, but all the patients that would have benefited from their care missed out, too. And given widespread staffing shortages among medical practitioners, ensuring that every qualified candidate passes should be a policy imperative.
Going beyond individual accommodations
In many settings, disabled candidates can ask for individual accommodations during an exam. This might come in the form of extra time or even a different medium—switching from a written exam to an oral test, for example.
However, individual accommodations aren’t really what accessibility is about.
If the test is designed in such a way that someone disabled can’t take it, then it’s not accessible, period. The individual accommodation is a band-aid that might work for some, but it may not be scalable. For instance, if you’re implementing a nationwide high school matriculation test, some forms of individual accommodation, such as having a proctor read text aloud, won’t be economically feasible simply because the exam is being issued to hundreds of thousands of students.
To be accessible, high-stakes tests need to be designed, delivered, and supported with accessible infrastructure. And in many cases, certification bodies don’t need to build out the infrastructure themselves. For instance, TAO’s natively accessible assessment software complies with WCAG 2.1 AA criteria and Section 508 guidelines, which mandate that US federal agencies provide the same level of access to disabled people that they do to able-bodied individuals.
How Accessibility Improves Quality
If you’re struggling to pitch accessibility investments to your team, keep in mind that accessibility standards are quality standards. For example, consider the POUR principles that inform WCAG: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. These principles aren’t just important for disabled users. They’re vital for anyone trying to use a digital interface.
Here’s why:
- Perceivable means that content is presentable in multiple ways. To meet this standard, assessment designers have to separate information and its structure. For instance, if an assessment item includes an image, the test-relevant information must be entirely translatable into text. This makes item rendering more predictable across devices. It also forces assessment experts to think through their ideas, resulting in clearer questions.
- Operable means that you can navigate a digital assessment through multiple input methods, including keyboard, voice, and assistive devices. Again, this helps prevent failures across browser versions and device types.
- Understandable means that digital exam interfaces must be predictable and prevent errors. This makes the exam experience more consistent for everyone.
- Robust means the content won’t suddenly change because of a technology upgrade. Over the long run, that means exam providers won’t need to devote resources to rebuilding exams as software and hardware get updated.
Auditability ensured
Moreover, accessible assessments are more auditable than inaccessible exams. The reasons for this are rather technical, but they’re worth summarizing:
When an assessment platform supports screen readers, it has to expose its logical structure through properly labeled elements—HTML and ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), to be precise. That exposure is the audit trail. Any reviewer can verify that items render as intended, making it easy to follow up on any claims that the exam didn’t present correctly.
In other words, by adopting accessibility standards, you also get a professional process for quality review.
Consistency is key
Today, digital assessments are delivered through a wide range of methods. They work in test centers with standardized hardware, on people’s personal laptops, in corporate workstations, on tablets, and even on smartphones. In terms of software, they run in different browsers, operating systems, and network conditions. Additionally, they have to work with remote proctoring, on-site proctoring, and distributed environments.
Accessibility standards establish the engineering discipline needed to achieve this consistency. The same code that enables a blind candidate to navigate with a screen reader ensures a test center workstation running an old browser renders items correctly.
According to the National Center on Educational Outcomes, universal design in assessment (UDA) includes 7 core elements:
- An inclusive test population
- Precisely defined constructs
- Accessible and non-biased items
- Amenability to accommodations
- Simple and intuitive procedures
- Maximum readability
- Maximum legibility.
Again, these universal principles apply to everyone, making tests easier for both able-bodied and disabled candidates to understand.
Better measurement, not easier tests
A common misconception is that accessible assessments are somehow “easier” or less rigorous. However, the opposite is true. Accessibility merely removes barriers unrelated to what’s actually being measured, so that unpredictable interface behavior doesn’t impact candidate scores. The result is a test that more accurately measures competence in the skills and knowledge being assessed.
Factors that affect scores without measuring the intended skills reduce the validity of test results. Returning to the example of the nurse practitioner above, if they fail because they can’t navigate a poorly designed interface, that doesn’t show us that they can’t care for patients. It merely shows us that the test was poorly designed.
By removing these confounding variables, accessibility results in cleaner measurement, making tests more rigorous for everyone.
Making Compliance a Competitive Advantage
In Europe, nearly 90 million people live with a disability. In the United States, that number is 70 million, an even larger share of the population. For credentialing bodies, the takeaway is clear: meeting accessibility mandates gives you access to a non-negligible customer base. A good first step is to review your current assessment platforms against accessibility and compliance standards.
If you find a gap in your ability to support accessible, standards-aligned digital assessment at scale, consider a platform like TAO, which is accessible by design.
And for more resources on digital accessibility, check out these articles on the TAO blog:
- Designing Digital Assessments for Accessibility from the Ground Up
- Why Schools and Governments Are Turning to Open Source Assessment Software
- Comparing Quality and Accessibility in Leading OER Examples
See How You Can Make Your Exam More Accessible
If you’re concerned about delivering accessible exams but don’t know where to start, contact us. Our open-source platform is designed for digital accessibility from the ground up. Perhaps most importantly, it’s simple to integrate with existing software, so you can focus on delivering robust, rigorous, and trustworthy exams and leave the infrastructure work to TAO.
Schedule a demo to see how TAO can help you deliver compliant digital assessments.
FAQs
What are accessible design principles?
Some of the most widely used digital accessibility principles are known as POUR: Perceivable (information is presented so that users can perceive it), Operable (interface components function properly), Understandable (content and navigation are clear and predictable), and Robust (content works reliably across devices and assistive technologies).
Why is accessibility important in high-stakes exams?
Accessibility is important for many reasons. Ethically, people should have a fair chance at displaying their competence in certification exams. Legally, laws like America’s ADA, the EU’s EAA, and the UK’s Equality Act mandate compliance with accessibility guidelines such as the WCAG, with serious monetary penalties for non-compliance. From a business perspective, if 15–25% of the population is disabled, it’s important to offer tests that everyone can take so you can maximize your customer base.
Does providing individual accommodations make an exam provider accessible?
No, providing individual accommodations doesn’t make an exam accessible. It may not be feasible to offer individual accommodations to everyone, particularly in large-scale, high-stakes exams that require proctoring. To be accessible, exams should be accessible by design so that individual accommodations are not necessary in the first place.
Is investing in accessibility expensive?
The cost of designing accessible digital exams varies significantly. Building an accessible assessment from scratch may increase upfront spending, but these exams will withstand hardware and software upgrades, so it won’t cost as much to update your system once it’s in place. Moreover, using accessible exam software, like TAO, also helps you ensure compliance without worrying about managing complex infrastructure.
