My CPACC Experience

Composed Saturday, February 8, 2025

I finished the exam on Thursday evening.

It was a culmination of a lot of effort. I have logged 120 hours of preparation. I have written this whole blog. Given the amount of preparation I did, it is not surprising that I felt very confident leaving the exam room.

I also felt motivated in some respects, and heartbroken in others.

How Did I Do?

Let's get this question out of the way.

I did well!

I'm fairly certain that of the 100 questions that were posed, I couldn't have got more than 18 questions wrong. I have 95% confidence on 82 questions, and 45% confidence on 12 questions.

If we lowball an estimate that I only got one third of the uncertain questions right, I still get 86/100.

With that all being said, at the time of writing, I cannot concretely say that I passed or not. I have heard that other people exit the exam room very unsure about whether they did well or not.

I feel like I did very well.

I used nearly the entire exam time. Of the questions I was unsure of, none of them were due to not having memorized a detail properly. All the questions I was unsure of required, shall we say, some interpretation.

So, were there trick questions?

I had heard prior to taking the exam that there would be lots of trick questions. I had interpreted that as being that there were going to be questions that were intentionally misleading. In reality, the exam had quite a few questions that could be interpreted in various ways due to open ambiguity of specific details, leading to multiple good answers that could have been argued for equally.

They were questions that I literally could have written full essays on justifying the merits of each answer. These were situations that could have been resolved had more detail appeared in the question itself. But most questions seem like they were edited down for brevity, resulting in guesswork and assumptions, resulting in interpretation and stress.

I've seen some people complain that the CPACC is sometimes more of a reading skills assessment than it is an assessment of knowing the material. I think those comments may take it a step too far. It does assess the knowledge, and most questions do not have the ambiguity problem that I described above.

Journey to CPACC

I've written about my Study Method before, and you can also read through the contents of Notes to see my preparation chronologically, my attempts to keep myself motivated, and more spelling mistakes. But let's talk a little bit more about some benefits I've experienced in preparing for CPACC.

Breaking into web accessibility is hard

Prior to November, I was spending a lot of my time trying to become an accessibility unicorn, and trying to learn a whole bunch of skills but mastering none of them, and feeling really down on myself.

Studying for CPACC gave me an organizing structure that I was finally able to feel productive about. It made me enjoy my everyday. I'm actually mourning the fact that it's over, but I am more confident that I know how to organize future learning endeavors into similar structures.

The biggest selling point of the CPACC is the validation it provides. It provides a structure of competencies to perfect, and when you perfect them, they give you a certificate. This certificate is pure motivation to not give up before the race has even started.

Because where else would a person in my situation start, especially in the current historical moment that we are in?

People don't believe me when I tell them that I am capable of conducting audits on a website. And then when they doubt me, and I've gained no money, and I've still gained no money, I start to believe them.

Learning!

It may sound obvious but another key benefit I've experienced in preparing for CPACC is that I've learned quite a bit. Some folks will critique the material of CPACC for being irrelevant for most digital accessibility practitioners. I'll talk more about the issue of 'relevance' in a later section of this essay, but here's some things that I personally really enjoyed learning about. These are things that leave me more enriched than when I started:

• Universal Design for Learning Principles. Really good stuff to know if you plan on going into training, are planning on doing public speaking, or even if you are thinking about how you want to raise a kid. Teaching is such a crucial skill and it's one that has major relevance to me: my second major side hustle right now is as a foreign language teacher.
• Seizure Disabilities. I had some pre-existing knowledge about many of the other disability categories. But seizures; I had no familiarity or sense of reference at all. Learning that not all forms of epilepsy are photosensitive was a humbling moment.
• Regional Bodies. I didn't really have a firm grasp of the EU vs the Council of Europe, nor did I know that the Organization of American States existed, nor did I know that the League of Arab States existed, or the Association of South Eastern Asian Nations, or the Organization of African Unity. That whole aspect of geopolitics was completely over my head and now I feel like I understand a little bit better, aspects of multinational cooperation at the level of human rights.
• Organizational Management. I'm very under-exposed to the world of project management. While I've memorized various implementation models in preparation for CPACC, I still have a hard time picturing what anything about organizational management looks like in practice. This whole section felt like an amuse-bouche for things I will likely run into in the future.
• Usability and UX. I didn't actually know the distinction between the two prior to this. Very valuable, and very relevant.

I truly did feel like I left more enriched than before I started.

But that does not mean that I left feeling more rich than before I started.

The sunk cost fallacy

Seven hundred dollars in my country's currency, after the exchange rate and exchange fee. I am lucky that I live with my parents and have a very low cost of living. Because I would not have been able to huck out that chunk of cash otherwise.

There are two points I want to make here.

More DEI

First, the IAAP needs to provide financial aid to Disabled people who cannot get funding from elsewhere. Not offering this actively excludes Disabled people from entering the profession. It leaves a very sour taste in my mouth that many Disabled people would absolutely soar through this exam if they had the resources to take it. But they won't take it, because that is a serious load of cash.

Instead, the test-takers are going to skew towards people who already have jobs, or people who will get it paid for through their work. Need I remind you again about unemployment statistics in the Disabled community?

What happened to nothing about us without us?

This is especially troubling if you imagine the amount of money that is being diverted away from Disabled people who would have acted on consultants on their own behalf, to ableds who have an entry-level accessibility certificate that they paid an enormous amount of money for.

Money as Motivator

To put it very crudely, the price tag lit a fire under my ass.

On the day of my exam, I woke up at 5 in the morning, and was wracked with anxiety until my exam started at 5:15 in the evening. I spent my 135 exam minutes pumped with adrenaline, and experienced euphoria upon exiting the building. The euphoria lasted for about 2 hours, after which I crashed. The next day, I felt like I had an emotional hangover. I barely felt like I could move, my head pulsed wildly, and I was extremely sensitive to light.

I tell this hopefully to convey the stakes that I felt that day. I paid so much money. And if I needed to retake the exam, I would probably enter a serious depression.

For context, it currently takes me about a month and a half to make 700 dollars in my country's currency.

So I really did take examination preparation seriously. I hope this is evident if you have interacted with other parts of this learning blog.

The issue was that I felt that while I took the exam seriously, the IAAP sometimes didn't.

My Beef with the Body of Knowledge (BoK)

Starting with an aggressive title because the faults within the BoK were the most frustrating part to deal with. For anyone aware of spoon theory, this absolutely ate up my spoons. Every broken link, every poor source, they all really messed with my ability to sustain effort and persistence in learning.

But despite feeling quite frustrated, I understand that the BoK is mostly formed by volunteer contributors. I have nothing against those people who made it and I'm grateful for the work they've done. There are some very precious treasures within the sources that they've compiled. I suppose I'm a bit bitter about the IAAP not doing much quality assurance when I paid so much to take it.

Broken Links

Here are all the links that are broken in the BoK. Most materials can be found through wayback.

Skip Table

On Sources

External links are the most important part of the Body of Knowledge. While there are many quality sources featured in the Body of Knowledge, a handful of poor quality sources also feature within the list.

Some sources are of poor quality because they are concerned with things outside of the scope of the Body of Knowledge. We might call these inapplicable sources. An example would be "US National Institutes of Health: Muscle Fatigue: General Understanding and Treatment" . This article is concerned with what causes the normal population to feel tired after exercise. It discusses the underlying biochemical mechanisms that create the feeling of fatigue post-exertion, and reviews the impact of various substances to either exarcerbate or ameliorate different performance measures associated with the biochemical mechanism of muscle fatigue. It is basically unrelated to 'muscle fatigue' in the context of orthopedic disabilities, which is covered far better by The "Scottish National Health Service: Information about Fatigue Management (PDF),"" tucked into the back of the Body of Knowledge with the rest of the 'additional reading.'

Other sources are of poor quality because they are severely old. "US Department of Justice: Accessibility of State and Local Government Websites to People with Disabilities" was produced more than 20 years ago. Their accessibility information includes recommending things like adding a 'long-description' tag (now deprecated) and writing alt text like 'Photo of X.' It also was written when keyboard shortcuts in screenreader software were not as versatile.

There are also some materials that are simply out-of-date. The BoK directs us to read about "UN ESCAP: Incheon Strategy "Make the Right Real" for persons with disabilities in Asia and the Pacific", a decade-long strategy created in 2012 with whose implementation ended in 2022. It was succeeded by the Jakarta Strategy. Given that the Body of Knowledge updated in October 2023, the Incheon Strategy should have been replaced. However this is only a single-year difference, and for a non-legal document, its omission is forgivable.

Less forgivable is the focus given to the Ontarians with Disabilities Act (2001), which is one of four national legislations that are highlighted in the BoK's main text (see Domain 3C#3). There is consensus that the ODA was weak legislation. There was practically no enforcement that the ODA could offer and it was corrected in less than five years. In 2005, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act was signed into law. This is the act that has determined the trajectory of accessibility and disability non-discrimination for more than twenty years now. It is the ADA of Ontario. People in North America are very familiar with AODA. I almost think that focus being given to the ODA, over the AODA, was a mistake by the BoK team.

Another strange inclusion was the focus given to the Air Carrier Access Amendments Act of 2017, a bill that died in committee a year after its introduction. ACAAA 2017 was never passed. I asked Samantha Evans about the inclusion of this bill. She essentially said that a different version of this bill came into law in 2022. In addition to the 2022 revision she pointed out, there was also a second revision that came into law in 2024. Samantha Evans said that the point of including the Amendments Act prior to the ACAA itself was "so that you can see where the 2017 act initiated what later became enforced law." The connection wasn't apparent to me, but hopefully you won't make the same mistake I did.

Some sources seemed unnecessary. The most unnecessary source was "Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute: Key Practices of the Capability Maturity Model Version 1.1." Not only is the PDF 479 pages long, understanding this 'key practices' document requires you to first read the Capability Maturity Model itself, which is another 82 pages long. And it is from 1993, and some of the management environments they describe are purely speculative.

Maturity Levels 4 and 5 are relatively unknown territory for the software industry [...]. There are too few [organizations] to draw general conclusions about the characteristics of Level 4 and 5 organizations. The characteristics of these levels have been defined by analogy with other industries and the few examples in the software industry exhibiting this level of process capability.

This management model was literally written prior to the age of software giants. To what extent does it still hold water in the ICT soup of today? The inclusion of this source, being so technical, specific, and lengthy, only causes distress for the examinee.

The last category of poor quality sources I'll discuss are the ones that were inaccessible. Here's a sample:

• African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights: African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (PDF). Untagged, scanned PDF. There are HTML versions of this text available. Why choose this one?
• UX Planet: Usability First — Why Usability Design Matters to UI/UX Designers. A lot of information in this article is within inaccessible infographics. They have no text alternatives. I've written out text alternatives in Usability/UX Notes.
• Business Disability Forum: Accessibility Maturity Model. The video, titled "Accessibility Maturity Model transitions" has no captions. YouTube automatic captioning is not a sufficient stand in for proper captions.

Why are there inaccessible digital sources listed in the Body of Knowledge for an exam that is mostly going to be taken by digital accessibility professionals?

On Direction

To what extent are we expected to know the contents of all the linked material?

It remains unclear to me. The Body of Knowledge offers 'recommended study activities' to guide one's preparation, but the scope of some of these activities are unclear enough to not be useful.

Here are the recommended study activities for the section on national and provincial instruments:

Identify prominent national and provincial instruments, such as laws and acts, that protect people with disabilities. Explain the main purposes of each.

The Body of Knowledge explores four pieces of legislation formally: the Equality Act, the ADA, ODA, and the EU Employment Equality Directive.

In the further reading, it includes materials for Denmark, Cyprus, France, Sweden, Korea, Japan, and India. It also links to directories that compile legislation around the world.

So what makes legislation "prominent"? Rumours I heard led me to believe that the scope was not restricted to only the four formally examined pieces of legislation.

Also how does one firmly establish the "main purpose" of a piece of legislation? Doesn't doing so require knowing quite a bit of political context around the establishment of the law? I can explain that the ODA's purpose was vaguely to appeal to Disabled people without actually creating the necessary conditions for progress in accessibility and anti-discrimination.

I needed clearer direction for my studying. Please clarify vocabulary. Please clarify syntax and structure.

On Relevance

Relevance to the Lives of Accessibility Professionals

It is a common critique that the CPACC focuses on material that is not relevant to the practices of accessibility professionals and that it does not really offer practical skills in the field of accessibility.

While I would agree that the exam does not teach practical skills, I would push against the idea that it is not relevant. If you are working in accessibility, you should know about Disabled people. You should know about laws. You should know about paradigms like universal design and reasonable accommodation.

It is important to know the justifications that underpin why there are jobs in accessibility in the first place.

Relevance to the Lives of Disabled People

Why are there jobs in accessibility in the first place?

I fear that CPACC's greatest failing is that people will leave with their certificates and without understanding the answer to this question.

Accessibility doesn't exist because it will introduce 'more customers, cost savings and provide an innovation spark' for a company. Accessibility exists because Disabled people fought tooth and nail for it. They threw themselves in front of buses to protest inaccessible transport. They threw aside their mobility aids and literally crawled up the steps of the Capitol to protest inaccessible spaces. They were caged in institutions for years, many still are. They continue to work for subminimum wage while corporations profit massively. They are expected to live in poverty. They are told nobody will listen to them and they tell their stories anyway.

Most people who take CPACC will leave with the impression that accessibility was simply granted by benevolent lawmakers. This is a whitewashing of history. It was not merely granted, it was struggled for.

Disabled people continue to struggle for accessibility. For Disabled people, accessibility is not merely assessed by whether a product meets technical specifications for accessibility. It also refers to whether we have our basic needs met. If we can't afford rent, then we are not going to buy a $20 ticket to attend your event with CART and ASL interpreting. That's not accessible for us.

We did have a moment where accessibility practitioners could operate under the pretense that accessibility is not political. But that moment is ending as I type this out. Under the new administration and rising anti-inclusion efforts, we cannot afford to pretend anymore; reasonable accommodation and enforcement of Section 508 are melting away before our very eyes.

Final Argument

Include our perspectives in the CPACC's Body of Knowledge. There is so much rich knowledge found in both the disability rights movement and the Disability Justice movement. Include us in the CPACC by offering financial assistance for exam fees. Include us in the CPACC by reviewing the BoK itself using the Universal Design for Learning Principles.

The CPACC is an exam about us.

Nothing about us without us.

Closing Thoughts

While the exam itself is imperfect, I have benefitted immensely from taking the CPACC. I have left it feeling happier and more confident. I feel empowered to enter this field, which is in itself just as imperfect but ultimately as noble, as the CPACC.

For more information on my CPACC experience, you can read through My Study Method discussing how I used the BoK, Logistical Details which clarifies processes around the exam itself, and other materials available on the homepage, including all my study notes and some interactive memory games.