Hi Alison
We had a Xerte developer meeting scheduled for today so that may explain why there hasn't been a response to your question until now and is certainly why I haven't responded until now because I wanted to revisit this topic during the meeting before responding. As a short answer we agreed that we should complete our own VPAT and make it available to the community but we don't currently have a completed statement for you to use. We'll share details once this is available.
However I'll add some further notes and comments and should probably start by saying that the following is my own personal opinion and others may have a different perspective on some of this.
As I'm sure you agree it's great that the change in regulations has triggered so much interest and activity around accessibility and inclusion and as I think you're aware accessibility has been at the forefront of our Xerte developments since before the tools were even made available to the wider community. Our focus has always been to make everything simple but anything possible and from the accessibility perspective this has meant to to try to ensure that what anyone creates with Xerte has a high degree of accessibility 'out of the box' without necessarily having to know the technicalities involved in that. However Xerte is obviously an authoring tool that users populate with all sorts of content and media and these days have wysiwyg tools to format much of that content too. Obviously technologies change and there are always improvements to be made and like most tools Xerte can be used really well or really badly when it comes to authoring accessible and inclusive resources. On top of that anyone with developer skills can further change how Xerte and the output it creates works for better and for worse.
So how is all this relevant to your request for a WCAG 2.1 AA Compliance Report?
As I say we are working on this and using the WCAG 2.1 guidelines and template. However having looked at similar reports for other authoring tools I would say much depends on the perspective and experience of the individuals involved in testing and making the judgements about each and every criteria, to the point where certainly some of the reports I've seen are completely misleading and/or contradictory and in some cases just a tick box exercise. e.g. the Conformance level for a particular criteria will say 'Supports' but the remarks and explanations will effectively mean it's supported but only if you do xyz and where xyz is only really doable by a developer rather than a regular user. I've seen one tool indicating they support a particular guideline and another tool saying their tool doesn't, whereas the difference seems to be more about their interpretation of the particular criteria and where the explanation of why it is supported or not supported, or what an author could do to ensure support, could easily apply to both tools.
Sorry that's a long way of saying we don't yet have a WCAG 2.1 Compliance Report but are working on one and the challenge there is we want ours to be accurate and appropriate for our actual user community rather than just a tick box exercise. What I can say is that most of our report will indicate support for each criteria. Our challenge is to explain that in a way that make sense to non-technical authors as well as those with a more specialist role. In the meantime the best place for Xerte accessibility guidance is
xerte.org.uk/index.php/en/main-pages/accessibility as well as the accessibility LOs linked from every Xerte LO created with the XOT project template.
In addition if anyone has carried out their own Accessibility testing with Xerte and/or created their own Xerte specific accessibility statements or reports we'd like to hear from you?
HTH
Ron
