Discovery: Non-compliant PDF Report

[laflannery]

Background

Currently, the 508 Office runs a Deque WorldSpace Comply scan to produce a report of all non-compliant PDFs on VA.gov. This report, in conjunction with the CMS notification system could be used to inform editors when the PDFs they have uploaded are creating an accessibility issue and need to be remediated and reuploaded.

This scan is one of the last of its kind, according to Martha Wilkes, and there are no other scans like this running. Also, and more importantly, this scan is probably going to be decommissioned and replaced by Level Access. Unfortunately, I do not have a timeframe for this switch. Martha said she would see if she could get an update from the 508 Office on this timeline.

Martha mentioned that she thinks the new LA scan might run monthly when it is eventually implemented.

Until we determine exactly what is happening with this report and when, I'm not sure how much specific work should be put into this as I wouldn't want to have to change everything when the report changes.

Acceptance Criteria

• [ ] Work with the 508 office to determine the future of the PDF scan
• [ ] Determine what the Sitewide Crew can do to prepare for scan switch

[EWashb]

We need to be able to flag PDFs that are not compliant and determine the content owner to rectify

[EWashb]

At a baseline, we need the identifier of PDFs.

[EWashb]

When we get this from Martha, we will pull it into a sprint. Until we get more info from Martha, this item will remain in the backlog. There's not a step forward to integrated with this report until we know what the process will be for reporting and that is dependent on another team's work.

[laflannery]

I found the existing Drupal CMS audit that I think could be helpful for this:

• A PDF audit was already built in the CMS, it can be accessed but going to Content > Media > PDFs
• Original ticket is here. Within the audit you can see:
  • A list of all PDFs that have been added to the CMS
  • Which user added them (the owner of the PDF)
  • Which section the PDF was added to
  • PDF URL on the Front-end (this could be used to match the the report we will eventually get possibly)
  • Information can be downloaded as a CSV

[laflannery]

Update: I did check with Martha but the contract is under dispute. We will most likely not get an answer on the scanning tool for at least a couple months

[laflannery]

The contract dispute has been resolved, Level Access is the new owner and the 508 office is just starting the onboarding of the contractors as well as installing the tech this week. Once this is set up we can determine the process for reporting (i.e., how often do the scans run, how can we receive reports from the scans, etc.)

[laflannery]

From accessibility meeting on 3/13 attendees Tim Taylor, Dave Conlon, @artsymartha68 , @laflannery

• Has the specific use case (we will be looking at who owns any non-compliant PDF to be able to contact them) been passed to LevelAccess?
  • They have been told we will be looking at PDFs but unclear if this specific use case has been explicitly told to them yet.
• Per Martha, we will wait on the first scan/report from LevelAccess. Once we receive that report and are able to view it, we can then see how this could work for us and the specified use case.
• We anticipate that we will need more iterations after this initial report, that it may not have everything we need in order to associate a non-compliant PDF with the owner that would be responsible for updating it.
• The risk of this approach is that as stated previously, the first iteration may not have the necessary information for the CMS team to immediately move forward on contacting editors regarding non-compliant PDFs. More iterations may be necessary which will take more back and forth and more time. This additional time may not go over well with other stakeholders/Congress and will need to be explained.
• We will revisit this in a month (4/10) to see if there has been movement on this report, what the status is

[laflannery]

From async accessibility meeting on 4/10:

Update from Martha send in Slack: VA 508 Office scans have been delayed even further into the fall due to ATO issues.

Due to this update, I will look for another update on this in November, rather than every month.

[laflannery]

Blocked until we get the AMP report and see what it's providing us for PDFs

[laflannery]

@EWashb We have AMP now but we also have the PDF audit in the CMS. I know we are still evaluating and figuring out AMP but is this still even needed now with the PDF scan and what VHA is doing on their end?

[laflannery]

We think this might be solved with AMP but leaving this open until we get a little bit more info.

There is also the bigger idea that ultimately we would like to get editors to move away form using PDFs in general in the long term