Pearson VUE Test Sponsor Support

The Accessibility Team for Assessments will support test sponsors by helping them understand the needs of people with disabilities. Our team will also offer information on different types of disabilities, how these disabilities can impact the ways candidates will access content, and the technologies that are used to overcome these barriers to access.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website reports that as many as 1 in 4 adults in the United States alone lives with a disability. People with disabilities are protected by laws that are designed to ensure equal and effective access to accommodations. This includes the provision of assistive technologies used to overcome barriers to access to digital content. Providing people with disabilities access to the same assistive technologies on certification exams that they use in their daily lives is often necessary to meet legal requirements for accessibility, but more importantly, it offers our test sponsors a more accurate and effective way to measure what learners know and can do. The Accessibility Team for Assessments can help test sponsors stay apprised of changes and innovations in assistive technologies and accommodations, as well as best-practice techniques for designing fair and equitable assessments for people with disabilities.

As test sponsors build assessments, the Accessibility Team for Assessments can offer guidance for how to develop content to support the widest possible range of access needs. This includes offering information on best practice styles that can be used to build artwork, color combinations that support access for users with various types of color blindness, and item types that can be used when accessing assessments using assistive technology.

Our team can conduct accessibility reviews of items and make recommendations about the best way to present content for users, outline the types of test preparation and resource materials that should be offered to users with disabilities in advance of the assessment, and provide access to tools and guidelines for writing powerful and effective alternative text for images.

As assessments are published, the Accessibility Quality Assurance team can conduct reviews of test forms with native users of blindness technologies such as screen readers and braille displays, to confirm that content will work well for candidates who are blind.

The Accessibility Team for Assessments conducts reviews of products to determine to what extent they meet international guidelines for accessibility. As these evaluations are completed, the team supports Program Managers with messaging to clients about the accessibility capabilities of Pearson systems and how system features will be used by people with disabilities.

The Accessibility Team for Assessments works with VUE Support Services Teams and the Pearson VUE Accommodations team to address unique requests for candidates. We partner with these teams to troubleshoot accessibility issues in test centers and to increase the ease of use of assistive technologies in Pearson VUE Test centers.

As Test Sponsors continue to explore the advantages of remote proctoring, there will be a significant increase in candidate requests to use assistive technology within exams delivered through OnVUE. The Accessibility Team for Assessments is currently partnering with Product Development and the VUE Accommodations Team to advise on how to best support candidates with disabilities who are testing remotely. We will continue to partner with teams in Pearson VUE to support the use of assistive technology for candidates with disabilities who are testing remotely. We will work to provide these candidates with access to the assistive technology tools they use in everyday life and we will support the development of effective awareness training for Greeters and Test Proctors. The training will address the impact of assistive technologies and accommodations on how candidates with disabilities may have to interact with assessment content and the remote testing environment.