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GCN Home > April 2, 2001 issue

Section 508 becomes this year’s Y2K

BY DIPKA BHAMBHANI | GCN STAFF

Agencies’ last-minute push to comply with Section 508 accessibility requirements by June 21 is producing a blitz of vendor initiatives and product modifications.

Hardware makers such as Compaq Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., for example, last month launched corporate accessibility units. Jocelyn Lai, HP’s program manager for accessibility, said her group will coordinate the efforts of all HP product divisions, each of which must use different techniques for accessibility.

Printers need front-panel power switches and paper trays that pull out and reinstall easily. PCs must be equipped with standard interfaces for assistive products.

Web sites face the same deadline. Human Factors International Inc. of Fairfield, Iowa, last month announced a contract award from the Library of Congress to make the library’s site comply with Section 508.

“We redesigned their intranet, and we will be doing the public site next,” said Human Factors’ Taruna Thapliyal. The contract is worth up to $600,000 if the library exercises all options.

Ten percent of all Human Factors’ government contracts over the past year have included modifications to satisfy Section 508, Thapliyal said. The company expects to double its percentage of federal business this year.

Macromedia of San Francisco, a developer of Web authoring software, also expects to double its nearly 20 percent of revenue from government. The company merged last month with Allaire Corp. of Newton, Mass.

Allaire’s ColdFusion software combined with Macromedia’s Flash and Dreamweaver packages can produce accessible sites faster, said Pat Brogan, Macromedia’s vice president of education and learning. Macromedia’s newest accessibility products include Flash Player animation software for the Microsoft Windows Pocket PC platform.

Macromedia also has teamed with UsableNet Inc., a San Francisco Web developer, to incorporate a Dreamweaver extension into UsableNet’s Lift Online application, which checks each page of a site for 508 compliance.

Human Factors’ government sales executive, Ed Frease, said agencies “started their Web sites five or six or seven years ago, and they’ve become unwieldy. You can continue to put patches on, or you can go back.”

Costly compliance

He said the company has rebuilt sites such as Cancer.net for the National Institutes of Health, as well as pages for the Census Bureau, Energy Department, IRS and Social Security Administration. Each agency is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to achieve a basic level of Section 508 compliance, he said.



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