Patent ID: 7280976

Claim:
For a product under review, a method for generating a compliance rating for federally mandated accessibility standards for said product, wherein relevance criteria for at least one provision of said standards has already been defined, comprising the steps of: a) identifying at least one configuration for said product to rate; b) determining which rules of said standard are relevant to said identified configuration; c) generating a list of user operation or maintenance tasks for said configuration that a customer would be expected to perform in the normal operation of said product; d) dividing each of said user functions intended to be performed into a plurality of sub-tasks; e) filtering said generated list of tasks as to appropriateness and applicability of said standards, wherein appropriateness is defined as those tasks required to be reported on; f) for each sub-task, performing said task and rating said performance against the identified relevant standards as defined therein as to whether said task can be performed in accordance with the associated relevant rules; g) for each relevant standard, assigning a “Y” value to the rating when the standard is met by the sub-task, and assigning an “N” value to the rating when the standard is not met by the sub-task, wherein the rating is recorded as a percentage instead of a “Y” value or an “N” value when a portion of the of the assessed configuration meets the standard and a portion does not; h) calculating a total compliance rating score for the configuration via a formula, wherein the formula includes an algorithm: Y total /(Y total −N total ), where Y total is the sum of all “Y” ratings for the configuration, and N total is the sum of all “N” ratings for the configuration; and i) repeating steps A—H until all configurations of said product under review have been rated.