Section 508 Statement of Direction for Service Support Products

To: Unicenter Service Desk Customers
From: The Computer Associates Unicenter Service Desk Product Team
Date: November 1, 2005

A number of our Unicenter ServicePlus Service Desk (USPSD) customers have asked for a statement of direction regarding our plans for the product line with regard to various accessibility guidelines. This statement is intended to provide a high-level understanding of our plans for future releases and does not provide specific information about the accessibility capabilities of our existing products. Please make sure that anyone with specific inquiries is directed to the appropriate Voluntary Product Accessibility Test (VPAT) results for their specific product.

We have recently undergone an aggressive program to standardize our accessibility testing and to ensure consistent reporting of our compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. This program helps our product teams properly determine which standards should be considered in the design of the product and also provides detailed training for our Quality Assurance engineers to effectively evaluate the product's compliance level in a hands-on testing environment.

This improved testing approach has identified a number of areas where our existing Service Desk product offering does not fully support the standards defined by the United States Accessibility Board.

We intend to address the majority of the discovered issues in follow-on releases to our most recent version (Unicenter Service Desk r11) within the next 3-12 months. Additionally, we have incorporated our accessibility testing plans into our release process to ensure that any new major release of our product will be designed, implemented, and tested to fully meet the appropriate standards and guidelines prior to being made available for public release.