Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 09/16/02 issue

GIS files elude efforts to meet 508 standards

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

Feds seek ways to make complex graphical files accessible to all online

The will is there, but the way hasn’t been found yet to make digital maps accessible to visually impaired federal workers.

“Specifically for maps, the technology just isn’t there,” said Amy Berger, the Geological Survey’s Section 508 coordinator.

Agencies and software vendors are finding it difficult to bring geographic information systems into compliance with Section 508 of the 1998 Rehabilitation Act Amendments, which requires agencies to make their systems and Web sites accessible to disabled users.

“Let’s face it, I’m blind,” Berger said. “If I go to a Web site, there is not much there that is going to let me see a map.”

But many federal agencies are looking for a fix.

One approach is to make the data tables behind a map accessible via a screen reader, Berger said. The data is tapped when a user moves a mouse over a tag on a Web site; the tagged image is described aloud by the screen reader.

“Section 508 doesn’t mean don’t include graphics, it means label them,” Berger said.

A thousand words

But data tables with large amounts of information take a long time to read, making them less accessible to visually impaired users. “I don’t want to spend all day looking through the information,” Berger said.

In those cases, agencies find that they must provide access via e-mail or telephone to a help desk staffed by workers who can describe the information on a map, said Doug Wakefield, an accessibility specialist with the independent federal Access Board.

Wakefield said in cases when a system generates a map to satisfy search criteria, the underlying descriptive data might not be available via tags.

“What an agency would have to do if somebody needed that information is to provide a telephone service. A person could call and ask for a description. It’s the data you need, not the map,” Wakefield said.

More news on related topics: Section 508



GCN Popup