Posts Tagged: accessibility

We Still Need to Convince People About Accessibility

I just read a blog post about the benefits of an accessible site. Despite working in accessibility for the past 15 years, sometimes I still get surprised that we even need to have the conversation about accessibility being necessary and the right thing to do–particularly in government where we’re required to comply with Section 508.Read… Read more »

5 Ways to Prepare for the Section 508 Refresh

We govies have been waiting for the Section 508 refresh for almost seven years. It was April 2008 when an advisory committee presented the first draft of the refresh to the U.S. Access Board. Section 508 is part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 as amended in 1998. The amendment includes accessibility requirements for government agenciesRead… Read more »

Accessibility is for Everyone – An Awesome Accessibility Alphabet

Gian Wild of AccessibilityOz made me aware of this awesome accessibility alphabet of mini-personas, reflecting a large group of people for whom accessibility in websites and documents is critical. This is the sort of material I think agencies should make available to all their staff to help them be more mindful of the range ofRead… Read more »

No Mention of PDF in Executive Order Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default

The first thing I did was look for a mention of “.pdf” in the document, but I didn’t find it. That made me wonder how effective this will be if specifics aren’t incorporated about requiring data formats that are more amenable for manipulation. Yes, I know that many tools exist for scraping and extracting structureRead… Read more »

A Case Study in Real-World Section 508 Compliance at the National Press Club on February 21st

Deque Systems is hosting a free seminar titled “A Case Study in Real-World Section 508 Compliance: How the VA is deploying the largest section 508 program in government” at the National Press Club on February 21st. This seminar will present the inside story of how the VA is deploying the largest Section 508 Compliance programRead… Read more »

New posts about IT Accessibility

The Accessibility Forum 2.0 blog added some great new content this Summer. Check it out and join the voices from the front line discussing Section 508. A new blog series called, “Department/Agency Section 508 Roles and Responsibilities.” Each post will be discussing different roles and responsibilities with regard to the implementation of Section 508. Department/AgencyRead… Read more »

How the Quick Reference Guide can help you understand Section 508

This week the BuyAccessible team attended the IDEAS 2012 conference. At our booth, people told us that the technical language in the GPAT was difficult to understand. That language comes from the Section 508 standard, so we can’t change it. But… a long time ago we created a resource called Quick Reference Guide that wasRead… Read more »

Accessibility issues with GovLoop

I just ran an web accessibility checker on GovLoop and found some errors: Missing form label on the search box Missing alt text on the sponsor graphics/links on the home page Sign up form: has good form labels on all fields except the date My page: No form label on “What are you up to?”Read… Read more »