AudioEye Trusted Certification
For customers adopting AudioEye Managed and AudioEye Enterprise, AudioEye provides an accessibility certification that details and validates the business or organization’s commitment to digital inclusion and, in pursuit of achieving optimal accessibility and usability, the extent to which they conform to the principles of inclusive design, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and other ADA-related laws, mandates, and guidelines.
The AudioEye Trusted Certification provides web publishers with a consistent stamp of approval from a reliable, third-party accessibility authority.
About AudioEye
Human Based. Technology Driven.
More than 65 AudioEye engineers and SMEs are Certified Professionals in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC), and/or Certified Web Accessibility Specialists (WAS), and/or Certified Professionals in Web Accessibility (CPWA) as maintained through the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). All work supplied in fulfillment of the accessibility audit services provided by AudioEye are conducted by certified AudioEye team members, or their work is overseen/validated by a certified team member. In addition, manual assistive technology (AT) testing is led by a Freedom Scientific JAWS Certified Tester. Over the past few years, the AudioEye team of accessibility engineers, SMEs, and testers has audited and remediated thousands of web domains and web applications. Today, on a daily basis, AudioEye – through the application of leading-edge dynamic remediation technology – serves billions of accessibility fixes across a network of more than 1,000 active clients who encompass some of the largest and most influential businesses and organizations in the world.
Learn more about AudioEye.
What the AudioEye Certification Represents
At AudioEye, we strive for inclusion with integrity. When our customers subscribe to one of our qualified services, it represents a deep commitment to digital inclusion and doing what it takes to ensure an optimal user experience for individuals with diverse abilities. The end-users – consumers and constituents of our customers – may rest assured that their individual needs have been taken into consideration, allowing them to engage and interact with confidence. At the same time, AudioEye delivers its product and service with confidence.
By entrusting a third-party accessibility specialist to conduct regular audits and commit resources to learn about the issues that impact usability and accessibility, to prevent and fix issues from impacting users, and to track progress through continued maintenance and monitoring, investing in accessibility represents a sincere commitment to the end-users who rely on the programs, services and information made available from our clients’ websites and web applications.
When an end-user encounters the AudioEye Trusted Certification Badge, they can rest assured that the business or organization they are interacting with has:
- Made a sincere commitment to ensure the highest level of access and usability for all end-users, regardless of their individual abilities;
- Strived ,and continues to strive to, adhere to inclusive design principles and achieve and maintain substantial conformance with AudioEye’s interpretation of the informative guidance supplied through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG);
- Supplied end-users with access to a 24-7 Help Desk that allows them to report issues to, and receive feedback from, accessibility professionals versed in the types of issues and access barriers that may impede or limit their access; and
- Provided free cloud-based web personalization and enhancement tools that emulate several different assistive utilities and allow end-users to customize the user experience to meet their individual preferences.
Who Benefits?
Centered on the principles of accessibility, usability, inclusive design and compliance, the products and services offered by AudioEye benefit everyone. By validating a business and organization’s commitment to these principles, AudioEye benefits our customers that not only want to do the right thing by their users, but also need to reduce their exposure and mitigate their compliance risk.
The AudioEye Certification strives to uphold the highest level of integrity, while providing our customers the highest level of service and the most advanced technological solution for addressing the needs of businesses and organizations striving to provide inclusive user experiences for their customers and end-users.
AudioEye Trusted Certification Website Requirements
To qualify for AudioEye Trusted Certification, the business or organization must be actively subscribed to AudioEye Managed or Enterprise solutions.
Subscribed customers must maintain good standing with AudioEye Contract Services.
General Requirements
When it comes to supplying our customers with the AudioEye Certification and certifying their websites and applications for accessibility, usability, inclusive design and compliance, we hold strong to our values, focusing on four key pillars, built on a foundation of integrity: commitment, action, personalization and sustainability.
Commitment
For customers adopting the Managed or Enterprise solution we begin to promote our customer’s commitment to accessibility and taking the necessary steps to conform with internationally and industry recognized best practices and guidelines (WCAG) to the greatest extent possible. This commitment is promoted in different ways. For customers embedding the AudioEye JavaScript, the AudioEye Trusted Certification Statement is promoted from the Certification Badge icon made available from the AudioEye Toolbar. For all AudioEye customers, AudioEye strongly recommends that they implement an Accessibility Statement page, which should be promoted and made available from the main site menu or, more commonly, the footer menu. Oftentimes, our customers will include the link alongside the Privacy Policy or other policy/term-related links. For customers not deploying the AudioEye Toolbar, but having subscribed to Managed or Enterprise services, implementing an Accessibility Statement page (or view within an application) is a requirement.
Action
In each of the stages descriptions supplied to our customers and promoted via the Accessibility Statement, one common theme persists: action.
From running automated site scans, to conducting end-to-end audits that require manual testers to evaluate and validate the many technical and functional requirements of WCAG, AudioEye assists its customers in taking action and achieving conformance to the international standards for accessibility. Not only that, but AudioEye fixes issues of accessibility on behalf of its customers through the implementation of its leading edge Dynamic Remediation Technology (DRT) solutions.
While the vast majority of accessibility issues are addressed through the application of AudioEye’s DRT solution, outstanding last-mile issues or issues impacting the visual display of the website may require the involvement of our client’s designers and/or developers to integrate fixes and improvements within the site design or a the source code level. While these items are usually minimal, AudioEye works with our clients/partners in a collaborative fashion to continually maximize WCAG conformance.
Personalization
Taking action should not end with conformance to guidelines and compliance.
AudioEye goes further than any other solution to address issues of accessibility. To complete the offering, AudioEye enables its clients with free assistive tools, the AudioEye Toolbar, that further reduce roadblocks for some users and enhance the user experience for others.
AudioEye provides its customers with additional options that may assist an organization looking to reduce instances of non-conformance. A primary benefit of complying with Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 is about fixing digital experiences for end-users leveraging their own assistive technology. While this addresses an important need and should be the focus of any organization, a much larger demographic of users (many of whom do not self-identify – or report – themselves as having a disability or impairment) may benefit from the availability of free user-friendly tools that allow them to customize and optimize their digital experience.
The AudioEye Toolbar allows business and organizations to provide their site visitors with a fully customizable user experience that is tailored to their individual needs.
These tools have benefits for all site visitors, but, in particular, aging populations and individuals who have vision, hearing, motor and intellectual (cognitive) disabilities, those who are color blind, dyslexic, are learning to read, learning a second language, or may prefer listening instead of reading.
Sustainability
As the last pillar, AudioEye customers must demonstrate a commitment to maintaining their conformance with best practices and ensure that, as new content is created and published, it is done so with digital inclusion in mind.
To assist our customers in meeting this important requirement, AudioEye may provide access to site evaluation reports generated and maintained within AudioEye’s proprietary, cloud-based Digital Accessibility Platform (DAP), which serves as a resource and body of knowledge to educate designers, developers, content authors and other accessibility stakeholders about issues of accessibility, how to identify them, and how to fix or prevent them. This same SaaS Platform is also the central repository for tracking and maintaining audits over time, which is critical for any organization looking to prove accessibility in the event of an audit request generated from, say, a third-party claim of non-conformance.
AudioEye also supplies its Managed and Enterprise solution customers with continual maintenance and monitoring, which is achieved through a mix of always-on smart monitoring technology and manual auditing services conducted by AudioEye Subject Matter Experts and Manual Assistive Technology Testers.
