Reno Touts Accessibility From: InfoWorld - April 24, 2000 - page 12 Attorney General Janet Reno last week detailed new government regulations requiring that technology vendors interested in doing business with the federal government make more products accessible to people with disabilities. Specifically she outlined Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1998, which requires federal agencies themselves to make their own technology operations and resources more available to the disabled. Section 508 covers federal Web sites, telecommunications, software, hardware printers and kiosks. It states explicitly that inaccessible technology may be purchased only if its accessible equivalent creates an "undue burden" by adding difficulty or expense. "Section 508 is a recognition that people with disabilities should not remain an afterthought," Reno said. Reno, however, maintains that an afterthought is exactly what the disabled have been, stating that 75 percent of people with disabilities are either unemployed or underemployed. Regardless she did stop short of saying that the government would mandate new accessibility regulations on the entire IT industry saying "We are not regulating." Instead Reno said that Congress was looking to provide incentives that would encourage the IT industry to voluntarily develop new accessible technology. President Clinton also included the disabled as a population cut off by the digital divide in his address to the IT community at Comdex last week and intimated that the disabled would be a focal group in the upcoming months. "In a couple of months we will have a part of this digital divide tour devoted solely to the potential that Web accessibility offers to disabled Americans to participate more fully in the educational and economic life of the United States," Clinton said. The Rehabilitation Act of 1998 can be found on the Department of Justice's Web site at http://www.usdoj.gov.