This is from TheCounter, an excellent counting service I use
for some of my sites for stats. It is about Section 508
compliance.
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TheCounter.com Professional Edition
Vol. 2 Number 23
June 6, 2001
http://www.theCounter.com/
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Are You 508-Compliant?
By Alexis D. Gutzman
On June 21, 2001, the Section 508 Federal Acquisition Regulation goes
into effect. Do you need to comply? Is your site ready? Section 508
potentially will be as disruptive and expensive for businesses as the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been. It will also make the
Web more accessible to millions of Americans and others who have been
trying to navigate it using text-synthesizing software. Like many
federal regulations, this is probably just phase one of a two-phase
rollout of regulation. Look for the federal government to expand the
regulation to include businesses within the next five years. Or perhaps,
businesses will be included under the "Bob Dole Memorial Americans with
Disabilities Act."
Section 508 requires that federal agencies' electronic and information
technology is accessible to people with disabilities. This is
accomplished by permitting all interactions with the software by
keyboard. The mouse - something I've never liked - becomes optional.
Everything the software needs to do will be doable by key combinations
with the tab key to navigate - the way that many savvy Web veterans
navigate today. I suppose this means that Netscape Navigator will
finally permit tabbing to the submit key or even just hitting enter on
the keyboard to submit a form, the way Internet Explorer has since 1997.
Any organization that takes federal money will have to comply unless
doing so represents an undue burden - the definition of which typically
has to be hammered out in court between your trial lawyer and that of
the person suing you.
To make your site Section 508 compliant, you need to make some minor
changes to the HTML code that browsers load when they receive your page.
These changes make images come alive to text-synthesizing software. Even
if your business is not covered by Section 508, you'll find the
following tips and resources helpful if your business sees much traffic
from older folks or the visually impaired - for example, nursing homes,
retirement communities, cruises, vision-care providers, etc.
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What You Can Do
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When you get done reading this, click over to the W3C's HTML Techniques
for Web Content Accessibility Initiative Guidelines (see the Resources
section at the end of this column). There you will find the nitty-gritty
details of what code to change and how. I'll give you the executive
summary:
1) Don't use tables to format your page. Use cascading style sheets
(CSS), instead. CSS doesn't work very well for anyone using version 3
browsers or earlier, but that is a small and decreasing proportion of
the population (less than one percent as of May 2001). Most people are
using Internet Explorer 5 (over 70 percent) that came with their new
$700 computers. Text-synthesizing software has trouble with pages that
are formatted with tables (most Web pages still are). Tabbing from link
to link is not very intuitive when the page is formatted with tables.
Search engines also prefer non-table-formatted pages.
2) Make sure all of your images - whether they are used as bullets or
image maps to provide navigation or to show stock prices - have
descriptive text in the alt or longdesc attributes. This is actually
more complicated than it seems, since many sites have charts and graphs
that are generated on-the-fly from real-time data. Even these charts
need to have useful descriptive text. "Stock price over time" is simply
not adequate. See the resources section below for an excellent tool that
generates descriptive text for the charts and graphs it creates in real
time.
3) Make sure you can get to every link and every field on every page
using only the tab key and that visitors can submit your forms using the
enter key.
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Resources:
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The official Section 508 Web site (http://www.section508.gov/). Point
your lawyer here if you think you are required to be in compliance.
The W3C (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-TECHS/) recommendations for making
your site accessible. Point your developers here, once you get done
arguing with them about why they need to use CSS, where they'll find
techniques for Web content accessibility from the W3C.
If your site uses real-time data, as many government sites and sites
that need to be accessed by government employees do, then you need to
think in terms of a commercial product that will deliver both the chart
and the descriptive text. The EPA and many businesses in this
predicament are using Corda's PopChart [D]. You can read more about what
Corda offers in Making Data Compelling
(http://ecommerce.internet.com/solutions/ebusiness/article/0,1467,7651_5
43761,00.html).
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About the Author:
Alexis D. Gutzman is an author, speaker, and consultant on e-business
and e-commerce topics. Her most recent book, The E-commerce Arsenal: 12
Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital Arena, was named one of
the 30 best business books of this year. For more information on her
upcoming speaking engagements, please contact her directly at
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