Voluntary Product Accessibility Template

[LevBHC]

Greetings,

I teach physics and astronomy at Dallas College (Brookhaven Campus). We use Stellarium as part of our courses. It has been wonderfully useful and our students have been enjoying working with it. Recently, due to changes in regulations, the college is requiring that all materials we use are "accessible." As a result of this new regulation, we would require a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) from Stellarium in order that we may continue to use it in our classes.

If you have a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 AA Template (WCAG) for your product, please send it my way so that I can submit it for Dallas College accessibility compliance review. Informational links regarding VPAT and WCAG are provided below.

Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) - https://www.section508.gov/sell/vpat
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) - https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/

I look forward to hearing from you!
~Lev

[github-actions[bot]]

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[gzotti]

I suggest any regulations intended to classify commercial products offered for sale to US authorities automatically don't apply to non-commercial free open-source products. We don't want to sell anybody anything and don't have to comply to such things even if we may do. And the web thingy by default does IMO not apply to non-web software.

What are the implications if we declare anything about our free program in terms of the US American "legal system" which most people outside USA entirely fail to understand?

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

[jchiar1]

Hello,

I'd like to revisit this question as I came across it while searching for the same information required by my college (a community college in California). I would love to keep using Stellarium on our classroom laptops (for laboratory activities), but my college has the requirement that any software, including free or open-source tools and lab applications, regardless of whether they have been used in the past, must be verified for data security and accessibility compliance.

These requirements apply to free and open-source software, not just licensed/paid software. This has to do with (Federal) FERPA requirements about student privacy and federal requirements regarding accessibility.

The requirements are that documentation be provided for:

• HECVAT (Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Tool) – for data security meaning that vendors explain how they protect sensitive student and institutional data (HECVAT)
• VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) – for accessibility compliance meaning that the tools (in the software) are accessible to students and staff with disabilities (meaning there is either screen-reader support or keyboard navigation options).

The previous poster (@LevBHC) provided informational links about these requirements.

Can this sort of documentation be provided for Stellarium?

Thanks,
Jean

[10110111]

accessibility compliance meaning that the tools (in the software) are accessible to students and staff with disabilities

I don't think Stellarium was developed with this in mind at all. Particularly, keyboard navigation is not really usable in the GUI dialogs, and you can't use a key to, say, select a star on the scene. Screen reader isn't something that's going to work with Stellarium either due to the way the scene is presented.

[gzotti]

Indeed, no developer so far has developed dedicated methods for disabled users. We are sorry the program may not be good for you, but would welcome contributions by developers who know what to do without breaking everything for our 15+-year legacy users. It may involve development of an alternative, completely new user interface (QtQuick-based?). Screen readers built into operating systems provide some limited support.

I don't think we are collecting any user data. The only thing that remotely touches user tracking, an IP-based location query to get you at least close to your location, can be switched off. AFAICS, these date are not stored anywhere, though.

We will certainly not sign any legal compliance documents with US authorities. If you like the software, use it. If not, don't.