Interagency Trusted Tester Program (ITTP)

The mission* of the Interagency Trusted Tester Program is to promote a unified, consistent, sharable, and repeatable test and evaluation approach for Section 508 standards conformance that federal agencies can implement throughout their information technology lifecycle to reduce redundant testing and improve cost savings.  This effort supports an overall vision* of improving IT accessibility across government through unified requirements, reviews [test and evaluation], reporting, remediation, and reuse.

* Denotes proposed statements that will be finalized once ITTP Steering Committee is formalized.

About ITTP

DHS is leading the effort to stand up the Interagency Trusted Tester Program (ITTP).  ITTP is modeled after the DHS OAST Trusted Tester Program (TTP) and is a strategic solution with a three-pronged approach:

1. Promoting across the federal government common evaluation processes and procedures for Section 508 testing of electronic and information technology (EIT).
2. Increasing the workforce skillset and capability by implementing a certification program for Section 508 conformance testing.
3. Creating a central repository containing trusted tester test results that can be shared amongst government agencies to reduce redundant testing.

Benefits

• Stakeholders can interact with, learn from, and share resources with peer agencies that are testing in a consistent manner.
• Supports interagency governance for changes to the Baseline Test Requirements, Test Process, and test tools.
• Trusted Tester model is Section 508 Refresh ready.   Note: Minor adjustments will be required when the 508 Refresh is complete.

DHS OAST staff assisted four outside federal agencies with adopting a ‘Trusted Tester’ (TT) approach to testing for conformance with Section 508 standards during the Unified Testing for Accessibility Project (UTAP) pilot. UTAP is a process that agency stakeholders follow to develop their own design and implementation plans for adopting Trusted Tester.  Federal agencies that wish to implement Trusted Tester can initiate UTAP within their agency by following the UTAP Guide under the below Additional Resources section.

Additional Resources

Use the UTAP Pilot Summary Report to learn more about the pilot background, approach, results, recommendations, and agency case studies.  The UTAP Guide-Conducting your own Unified Testing for Accessibility Project offers guidance that is useful to conduct UTAP within your organization.  Use the Section 508 Organizational Maturity Assessment forms to compile the data collected in your organizational maturity assessment.

• Download “UTAP Pilot Summary Report” (Release 1.0 | December 2015)
• Download “UTAP Guide” (Release 1.0 | December 2015)
• Download “S508 Organizational Maturity Assessment Form Instructions” (ver 1.0 | October 2015)
• Download “S508 Organizational Maturity Assessment Form A” (ver 1.0 | October 2015)
• Download “S508 Organizational Maturity Assessment Form B” (ver 1.0 | October 2015)