Making Government Accessible - Online
From: Federal Computer Week 04/19/2004 - Vol. 18, No. 11, P. 21
By: Sara Michael

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act requires e-government services to be
available to all citizens, including those with disabilities, but this is a
tall order for many initiatives, even those with close-to-full accessibility.
SSB Technologies' Chris Henderson explains that achieving 100 percent Section
508 compliance requires a coordinated effort for more commitment to the
issue, adding that the results of a survey of top e-government projects his
firm conducted with Federal Computer Week show that more training or aid from
industry accessibility experts is necessary. Among the provisions that are
difficult to satisfy is supplying text equivalents for images and other
nontextual content, and including labels that indicate what data should be
entered in each field of an electronic form. Detecting such problems is what
Section 508 tools are designed to do, but experts note that the results of
automatic testing may diverge when certain tools are employed. Martin
Kwapinski, content manager for the General Services Administration's FirstGov
Web portal, reports that code inconsistencies picked up by Section 508 tools
do not necessarily mean that a page will be inaccessible to disabled users.
On the other hand, the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) GoLearn.gov
initiative received high marks on the SSB survey because managers decided
early in the development process to team up with other federal agencies and
industry, and worked with the Justice Department's accessibility officials to
create a best practices document and collaborated with a committee to
ascertain how best to assess on-site courseware, according to the OPM's Larry
Mercier. Close industry collaboration helped relay needs, and the managers
refused to accept any product that offered less than full accessibility.
"We'd like to make sure the community of practice for Section 508 is
championed by the initiatives such as ourselves, because we have such a wide
grasp and we are effecting the change of government," says Jeff Pon, acting
project manager for the E-Training initiative. Many leading e-government
efforts should not overlook the importance of human testing. 

http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0419/feat-access-04-19-04.asp