Here's an update on Section 508 issues.

kelly



>From the web page
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0807/cov-access-08-07-00.asp

Federal Computer Week

Adapting systems for the disabled isn't as tough as you think

BY William Matthews
08/07/2000

By the hundred, government World Wide Web page designers troop
into an auditorium at the General Services Administration for a
crash course on accessibility.

They have three hours to learn the basics: Provide a text
equivalent for every nontext element on a Web page, write
scripts explaining videos and include visual cues to accompany
audio prompts.

Spurred by the realization that time is growing short and that
the task ahead is enormous, the federal government is training a
small army of Web page designers to lead the coming battle
against inaccessibility.

The government is under the gun. In about eight months, federal
agencies must begin complying with accessibility requirements.
That means government Internet sites and information kiosks must
be made usable by members of the public with disabilities
ranging from blindness to impaired mobility. And government
offices must begin acquiring computers, software and office
equipment that can be used by employees with disabilities.

If agencies fail, one Web page designer explained, "They will
have the opportunity to be sued by the public."

It's the Law

Federal agencies are put in this precarious position by a
14-year-old law that until now has been safe to ignore. It's
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and it prohibits federal
agencies from buying, developing, maintaining or using
electronic and information technology that is inaccessible to
people with disabilities.

A dozen years passed with little progress under Section 508.
Then in 1998, Congress amended the law with the Workforce
Investment Act to give members of the public and government
employees with disabilities the right to sue agencies in federal
court and file administrative complaints for noncompliance.

While applying legal leverage to agencies, Section 508 also
shrewdly uses government buying power to pressure companies to
produce accessible products. Section 508 standards will become
part of the Federal Acquisition Regulation and other federal
laws that govern agency buying. Simply put, companies that fail
to create software and hardware that meet accessibility
standards will no longer be able to sell to federal agencies.
Enforcement was to begin this month, but delays in writing the
standards that agencies must meet persuaded Congress to push
back the date the standards will take effect.

The new date is six months after final Section 508 standards are
published. The standards are expected in late September or
October, which would make the compliance deadline next March or
April, said Doug Wakefield, an accessibility expert at the
federal Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance
Board - the Access Board - the agency responsible for developing
the standards.

For the most part, complying with the law will not be difficult,
but it will be time-consuming, according to Wakefield and other
government technology experts. There are hundreds of thousands
of Web pages to be corrected. And eventually, tens of thousands
of pieces of office equipment will have to be modified or
replaced.

"It's Not That Hard'

With the possibility of legal action looming, federal agencies
have finally begun tackling accessibility. Much of their effort
so far is aimed at the Web.

Fixing Web sites first makes sense. "Web sites have the most
impact on the country," explained a contractor hired to help a
division of the Commerce Department bring Web pages into
compliance.

While compliance efforts in government offices could benefit
nearly 200,000 legally disabled workers employed by federal
agencies, Web pages have the potential to reach millions. For
federal Web page designers, "accessibility" means government Web
pages must be usable by people who have vision or hearing
disabilities, have limited use of their hands or suffer from a
variety of other disabilities, from colorblindness to photo-
sensitive epilepsy triggered by rapidly flashing lights.

The job may seem daunting at first. "I've heard some Webmasters
say will need to take out liability insurance, or that they plan
to take their Web sites down altogether. That's outrageous,"
Wakefield said. "It's not that hard."

Often, fixing Web pages simply means attaching text explanations
to photos, graphics, and video and audio features so they can be
understood by those who have vision and hearing disabilities.
Revisions may also include changing some colors, improving the
organization of information and providing alternative text-only
pages.

Among the biggest problems are tens of thousands of documents
that were created in Adobe Systems Inc.'s Portable Document
Format and Microsoft Corp.'s PowerPoint. Although they look like
text, the documents are actually graphic files and cannot be
read by the current generation of screen readers or translated
for Braille displays.

The sheer volume of such pages probably means that not all will
be accessible when the deadline arrives, said Ron Kelly, who
heads the GSA project to teach federal Web page designers how to
make agency Web pages meet 508 standards. But the most commonly
used federal Web pages will be ready, he said. "I'm hoping that
the 1,200 people who have gone through the program will not
design any new pages in the future that aren't accessible,"
Kelly said. If Webmasters can manage that, the accessibility
problem will be largely solved, he said.

Because agency Web pages change frequently as new information is
added and old data is dropped, creating only accessible pages
for the next eight months will go a long way toward eliminating
noncompliance among the most com- monly used pages, he said.

As for the PDF documents, "There will have to be some judgments
made about what agencies are going to devote their resources
to," Kelly said.

Questions about cost and compliance were weighed heavily at a
recent meeting of the Federal Web Business Council, whose
members calculated that there isn't enough money in the federal
budget to create 100 percent compliance. The best hope, they
said, is that demonstrating "good faith efforts" to come into
compliance will be enough to shield agencies from lawsuits.
Fixing deficiencies in Web pages may be the easy part of
complying with the Section 508 standards. Accessibility goes way
beyond the Web.

The Real World

Government agencies own tens of thousands of computers, software
programs, photocopiers, printers, telephones, fax machines and
kiosk-like "information transaction machines." All must be made
accessible.

"It's not budgeted for," said Joe Tozzi, director of an
assistive technology team at the Education Department. "No one
knows an estimate of the cost, and it's not in the 2000 budget
or in the one for 2001."

The Access Board has estimated the cost of compliance to be from
$177 million to more than $1 billion annually.

But the law offers agencies a financial escape hatch. If
compliance is determined to be an "undue burden," agencies will
not have to comply. A clearer definition of "undue burden" and
when it can be evoked are among the details still being worked
out.

'No Technological Showstoppers'

Whatever the cost, meeting compliance standards for software and
hardware "is going to be a very big deal," said the Commerce
contractor.

A survey by the Justice Department conveys the scope of the
problem.

"Almost all software applications contain some barriers to
people with disabilities," the department reported in April.
Those affected most are people who are blind or have limited
vision and those who have multiple disabilities that include
limited manual dexterity, the agency reported.

Compliance may mean that computer operating systems unable to
work with assistive technologies such as screen readers or
Braille displays have to be scrapped, and software that cannot
be used by disabled agency workers will have to be modified or
replaced, federal IT specialists said.

"But there are no technological showstoppers," said Don Barrett,
an assistive technology specialist for the Education Department.
Indeed, for each problem, there is a technological solution.

For several years, Barrett and a half-dozen others on an
assistive technology team at Education have been busy testing
hardware and software to see what meets accessibility standards
that Education imposed on itself in 1997. Fully compliant
software is rare, the team found.

"We have not found any office suites that are 100 percent
accessible out of the box," Tozzi said. If the word- processing
program, e-mail and messaging features are accessible, that may
be the best that's available. "That covers what most people use
most of the time," he said.

While testing software and hardware, the assistive technology
team made an encouraging discovery: Software companies usually
have been eager to make whatever changes are needed to meet
Education's accessibility requirements, Tozzi said. When a test
of Corel Corp. software disclosed accessibility problems, for
example, the company scrambled to fix them within 48 hours.

Making Section 508 part of the Federal Acquisition Regulation
will tap industry's eagerness to please a customer with the
buying power of the federal government. Each year, federal
agencies together spend about $40 billion on information
technology, and when Section 508 is incorporated into the FAR,
federal agencies will have to buy software and hardware that
meets accessibility standards.

"This is the largest buyer in the world saying it needs to be
accessible. Industry is going to actively pursue that," Tozzi
predicted.

No Mandated Design

Industry officials agree. With so much money at stake, "someone
will meet the customer's demand - this a very competitive
industry," said John Godfrey, a technology policy director at
the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI).

Hardware fixes may be the most difficult part of complying with
Section 508.

The law applies to myriad office equipment, from copiers and fax
machines to computer mice and telephones. Today, according to
Justice, most office equipment creates barriers for the
disabled.

>From the liquid crystal display screens used to communicate
operating instructions and error messages - useless to the
vision-impaired - to operating buttons placed out of reach of
people in wheelchairs, office machines are generally not
designed with the disabled in mind.

Many of those will have to be replaced, but not right away.
Although Section 508 requires agencies to "develop, maintain and
use" only electronic and information technology that is
accessible, the law's enforcement provisions cover only the
"procurement" of those products.

That means agencies can be sued only for noncompliant equipment
they procure after the effective date of the Section 508
standards.

The law was written to avoid being "terribly design-specific,"
which is good from industry's perspective, Godfrey said. "That
allows you to innovate. That's what ITI members are good at."

In some cases, the fix may be as easy - and as low-tech - as
attaching Braille labels to office equipment, technology
specialists say. A more comprehensive solution might mean
designing a new generation of accessible office equipment.

But technology offers other alternatives. During its survey,
Justice found that "the extent to which copiers and fax machines
are accessible is greatly enhanced when the user can send
commands from an attached desktop computer terminal. Such
terminals can be easily outfitted with the appropriate assistive
technology to meet an individual's needs."

Thus, office machines tied to office computer networks may
eliminate many accessibility problems, Justice reported.

Technology Provides Answers

It is somewhat ironic that the solution to the accessibility
problem is advancing technology, for that is also the source of
the problem.

Two decades ago, before the mouse and graphical user interfaces
and the Internet, technology typically made it easier for
disabled people to do their jobs. Screen readers were adept at
translating DOS-based computer pages for the blind. Keyboard
commands were simple and straightforward. There were few, if
any, audio features to impede deaf users.

But that began to change in the mid-1980s with the advent of the
mouse and the point-and-click applications of GUIs.

Icons and mouse cursors made computers easier for most people to
use, but they greatly complicated the task for many people with
disabilities. Screen readers and Braille displays could not
understand buttons, graphics or pictures. Documents that were
stored in graphical formats were similarly unreadable. To use a
mouse required sight and a degree of manual dexterity. And the
increased use of sound created new obstacles for people who are
hearing-impaired.

"Many people with disabilities who were capable of functioning
fully in the past were locked out due to technology advances,"
according to the Justice report.

But the momentum of technology is changing, accessibility
experts contend. Developments that will help the disabled are
starting to be recognized as potentially useful to everyone.

Kelly, for example, has this vision: He's driving down I-395
outside Washington, D.C., in rush-hour traffic so thick he dares
not glance away from the brake lights ahead of him. Gripping the
wheel, Kelly says, "Computer. Check e-mail." A dashboard light
begins to blink as the car's computer fetches the e-mail.

"Read it," Kelly instructs, and a twangy electronic voice begins
reciting the contents of the first message.

The day may not be far off, Kelly said, when products designed
for accessibility - like voice-recognition software and screen
readers - will be recognized as useful for a far wider
commercial market.

When that happens, he said, accessibility will become part of
the design process for information technology, and
inaccessibility will become a thing of the past.


Copyright 2000 FCW Government Technology Group


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