What is the ICT Testing Baseline Portfolio?
The ICT Testing Baselines (aka, the Baselines) provide a standardized set of test procedure components for evaluating Section 508 conformance. Incorporating the Baseline tests into a testing process ensures that necessary elements of information and communications technology (ICT) are tested, reducing the risk of overlooking important requirements and ensuring comprehensive ICT accessibility test results. The Baselines provide clear guidance on what needs to be tested, helping organizations assess the accuracy of their testing methodology and tools.
The ICT Testing Baseline is:
The ICT Testing Baseline is not:
The Portfolio includes a Baseline for Web and a Baseline for Documents. Additional Baselines will be developed for all ICT covered by Section 508 including software and hardware.
How to Contribute
If you are a federal employee or provide direct contract support to a federal agency, we invite you to contribute directly as a member of our ICT Testing Baseline Portfolio Working Group. Even if you are not a federal employee or contractor, we still welcome your feedback and contributions via submission of issues and pull requests in the ICT Testing Baseline Portfolio GitHub repository. We are also happy to accept your input and recommendations for other methods of contributions via ictbaseline@gsa.gov.
Contributors do not need to be highly technical nor make a long-term commitment, although both skills and time can certainly be helpful.
The ICT Testing Baseline Working Group needs help refining ICT Testing Baselines. Below are the current Baseline Working Groups:
- Baseline for Electronic Documents
- Baseline for Hardware
- Baseline for Software
- Baseline for Web
The ICT Baseline Alignment for Web Working Group also needs help developing and evaluating web test cases. You can submit web test cases to help validate test processes and tools as pull requests in the ICT Testing Baseline Portfolio GitHub repository. Current web test cases can be viewed at ICT Testing Baseline Alignment Framework along with more information on contributing.
The resources on this page were created through interagency collaborative efforts sponsored under the Accessibility Community of Practice (ACoP), a committee under the Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council and the Federal Chief Acquisition Officer (CAO) Council. These resources are endorsed by the ACoP for use across the US Government for validating conformance to the Section 508 Standards.
Reviewed/Updated: July 2025
