Christopher McMillan <[log in to unmask]> sent along the following article
about software that provides painless compliance with 508 web
accessibility guidelines.  This software seems really nifty.

kelly

The accessibility fix is in
BY WILLIAM MATTHEWS
10/02/2000

There are 27 million federal government pages on the Internet, and Section
508 of the Rehabilitation Act says they must be accessible to people with
disabilities by next spring or the agencies that posted them may be sued.
Besides producing a lot of anxious federal Webmasters and eager lawyers, the
situation is generating innovation by the California software maker SSB
Technologies Inc.

The company has produced two software programs that can scan Web pages,
determine whether they are accessible and tell page designers how to fix any
flaws. The programs are InSight, which diagnoses Web page problems, and
InFocus, which tells how to correct them.

According to SSB's technology chief, Timothy Springer, InFocus 2.0, the
latest version of the product, will provide Web page designers with
step-by-step instructions for correcting 62 of the most common accessibility
problems on Web pages.

By finding and suggesting fixes for faulty Web page elements, the software
can cut the time it takes to make pages compliant with Section 508
accessibility standards by 75 percent, according to SSB.

Accessible Web pages are pages designed so that the information they contain
can be used by people with disabilities ranging from blindness and deafness
to limited dexterity and learning challenges.

SSB's software "shows you where in HTML code you've gone wrong and lets you
go in and try to fix it. It's a pretty nifty thing," said Curtis Chong, a
technology specialist at the National Federation of the Blind.

The software could be a substantial help to federal Web page designers when
the race to comply with Section 508 standards begins, said Doug Wakefield,
accessibility specialist for the federal Architectural and Transportation
Barriers Compliance Board. The board is writing the standards and expects to
publish them in early December, he said.

Once the standards are published in the Federal Register, government
agencies will have six months to come into compliance or be vulnerable to
lawsuits.

"I'm glad to see something like [InFocus 2.0] developed," Wakefield said.
"I'd also like to see something like this developed to see if application
programs are compliant."

Learning to use InFocus and InSight requires a day of training, said Doug
Aley, an SSB spokesman. "The software is easy to use and intuitive."

Users can have InSight examine individual Web pages for noncompliant
features or let the program spider through an entire Web site to produce an
inventory of errors.

The most common faults are missing text descriptions to accompany graphic
elements, Springer said. To meet Section 508 requirements, page designers
must often add captions for pictures and spoken transcripts for videos and
written ones for audio segments, he said.

Web page designers tend to approach accessibility repairs with reluctance,
fearing that required changes will destroy the appearance of pages that they
labored to create, Springer said. "But nine times out of ten, with a little
training, you can make it look just like the old page," he said. InFocus
provides a feature that permits page designers to preview changes before
they become final


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