Accessibility auditor - acknowledgements
An acknowledgment can be used to manually mark an issue to be ignored. Many of the WCAG checks are not black and white and will only be an error in certain circumstances that cannot be determined by a computer.
This means that a number of checks will be marked as needs review - because manual review is required to determine if the issue is actually a failure.
When creating an acknowledgment options are available to control the scope of the acknowledgment (whether it affects just a specific occurrence or wherever the issue is found) and also to record justification for the acknowledgment (in case an audit trail is required).
Creating acknowledgments
Failures can be acknowledged from the document level report by selecting one of the acknowledged items from the failure’s popup menu, or by clicking the create acknowledgment button on the details popup window.
This opens the acknowledgment screen which allows the failure to be acknowledged. Options are provided to define the following:
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Acknowledgment type: choose to ignore the failure (because perhaps you have mitigated the failure in another way) or pass the failure (because the failure is only in certain circumstances and you have verified that it’s actually a pass).
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Reason: Provide some information justifying why the acknowledgment is appropriate (for audit purposes).
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Scope: Define a scope for the acknowledgment - does it apply to just this specific error? anywhere the error is detected? etc.
Managing acknowledgments
The acknowledgments screen (accessed from the left hand menu) lists all the acknowledgments that have been created for the service and allows an administrator to manage the acknowledgments.
