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Catherine Alfieri
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Pittsford, NY 14534
716-586-1682
Monroe County Women's Disability Network
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"See with your heart, Speak with your heart!"
TekInsight puts Web sites through accessibility paces
BY BRIAN ROBINSON
JUNE 4, 2001
TekInsight.com, which develops Internet applications for federal, state and
local government, has developed a service through which agencies can check
whether their Web sites are accessible to people with physical disabilities.
The company will test pages for compliance with the standards in Section 508
of the federal Rehabilitation Act, which mandates that federal agency Web
sites, along with other equipment, be equally accessible to disabled
employees or citizens.
To do tests and produce an extensive report on around 100 Web pages would
cost approximately $10,000, with any remediation that's needed being a
separate action and charge, according to the company. If a number of user
interface files have to be changed, that process could take up to four
weeks. But if just one file controls the user interface for all Web pages,
remediation might last just one day.
"You don't necessarily need a large investment of time or money to backtrack
on a Web site and make it compliant," said Kyle Tager, TekInsight.com's vice
president of e-government services. "It's more a case of changes having to
be made to the basic user interface, and you seldom have to make changes to
backend systems."
And it's not just a case of bringing a site up to the level of compliance.
TekInsight actually found that its first customer, Somerville, Mass., had
made its site 508-compliant, but in doing so, had made it confusing for some
of its disabled users to navigate.
The Section 508 mandate only covers federal agencies, and those sites funded
with federal dollars. However, said Tager, many state and local governments
receive federal funds for certain activities, and analysts are predicting
the requirement will eventually trickle down to them also.
Still, even without a mandate, state and local governments are independently
looking to boost the accessibility of their sites to disabled citizens, as
was the case with Somerville, Tager said.
Robinson is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Ore. He can be reached
at [log in to unmask]
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