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GCN Home > 10/25/04 issue

Setting sites on Section 508

By John McCormick, Special to GCN

Software tools—and a little forethought—can make sure your Web pages work for every user

Ever since the first President Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law, agencies and private businesses have been under increasing pressure and progressively tighter regulations to make all goods, employment and services available to the disabled.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 reinforces and ex-pands ADA’s requirements. It requires most federal offices to buy accessible IT products, with minor exceptions for military, mostly combat-related purchases.

This guide focuses on Web development and publishing tools that let agencies develop accessible applications and make documents available to users with visual impairments. The accompanying chart also includes some end-user tools.

A logical place to start is with Microsoft Corp., which has the most widely used computing platform in government. The company’s products include a lot of accessibility tools, and even developer tools, that work with its newer operating systems.

There is a decent screen magnifier in Windows XP, which also includes a text-to-speech tool called Narrator. It is pretty limited and is only available in English, but it provides a useful tool in Notepad, Wordpad, Control Panel and Internet Explorer, as well as the Windows desktop and Windows setup.

An easy way to start Narrator is to open the Utility Manager by pressing the Windows logo key and the U key, which lets you start and stop both the magnifier and the text-to-speech tool. Internet Explorer itself provides a multitude of means to tweak the way a Web page will appear on the monitor.

The ability to customize Explorer and to provide text-to-speech output can, for those with minor impairments, eliminate the many costs involved with installing and maintaining third-party tools. Often the biggest barriers to accessibility are created unintentionally by co-workers or even by management policies specifying that something should always be done a certain way. A policy could be created in good faith to engender a consistent workplace environment without consideration of how it affects disabled workers.

Probably half the commercial Web sites I visit use low-contrast background and text combinations simply because someone decided they looked interesting or fancy, but they are harder to read.

That’s no longer true of most federal sites. But something even more ubiquitous than Web pages is the simple printed or electronically ex- changed and displayed document.

More news on related topics: E-Government, Section 508, Web Strategies