Slashdot Mirror
Adapting Existing Federal Web Sites For The Disabled?
Rafajafar asks: "I work as part of a federally-funded Webteam for a prestigious laboratory in the states. It has recently come to my attention that our government has placed a burden on us. Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act back in '98 which instantiated a committee to ensure that all federal technologies do not treat those with disabilities unfairly. This board released a set of standards that they created to ensure that the government doesn't violate the Rehab Act. This, although wonderful for the disabled, leaves many of us media lackeys at these federal facilities with a bit of a conundrum. How do we fix all this stuff within 6 months? Our site has thousands of pages that would need to be sorted through by hand and even with us abandoning all projects for 6 months, we would not be able to guarantee all pages to be fixed. I know our team isn't the only one with this problem, so I was wondering if you guys have any good ideas on how to go about changing our site, our videos, our presentations, and pretty much anything else that relies on one sense over another. We would prefer to avoid using the 'Undue Burden' clause as much as possible."
The w3 has been talking about this for years. The Web Accessibility Initiative is their site dedicated to exactly this issue, and is rich in information and resources for implementation. See particularly the guidelines, checklists, and techniques sections.
You do have a lot of work ahead of you. It's much easier to start with accesibility in mind than to retro-fit everything. You might be able to script some of it, as others are suggesting, but your first step should be to thorougly familiarize yourself with the information at the WAI.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".
HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.
HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.
Web sites don't rely on one sense over another unless they've been written poorly. A well-written Web site will adapt seamlessly to any display device, whether it's your 21" monitor, your PalmPilot, or your speech browser.
Of course most Web sites are written poorly, so now you have to fix the mess. Good luck.
Have a look at the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative for some guidelines and techniques.
While I think that the federal government is really going way overboard on "disability compliance", etc. etc., there is one way that this burden might be reduced. If all of the pages on a site are formatted the same, you could use a Perl script to automate a lot of the changes. If you're using stylesheets, even better; a simple addition of extra media types will make many pages instantly "handicapped accessible."
It seems to me as though this is a piece of legislation that has been passed to make people happy rather than to actually be implemented in full. Sure you should make some of your more critical web pages compliant, but if I were you I'd prepare a time study detailing exactly how long it'll take you to get all these changes implemented, and watch how fast they decide it falls into an "Undue Burden" category...
If you really need to do so at some later point it can be done then, but as it is it's a lot of effort for no real gain. This sounds harsh, but sometimes it's just not worth the time to cater for such a small part of your audience - just look at how many sites are giving up on supporting Netscape because it's dead and there's so little point in spending the time to keep a site compliant for different audiences...
I have to congratulate Jlab on doing a stunningly great job on the safety pages. I was awestruck that you put the emergency evacuation plans available for the public to see, right down to showing where the extinguishers are in each building. Amazing.
However, each one of these pages alone represents a true barrier to the handicapped. For example, if a visually impaired user heard the fire alarm, and navigated to the Jlab web site in order to find their way out of the building, one can just imagine their screams of fright when they realize that their only resource is a JPEG. Oh, the horror. If only the web designers had thought ahead, and planned for these kinds of circumstances, death could have been avoided.
Sarcasm aside, man, you really do have a heck of a case for the undue burden clause. A lot of the stuff on this site is frills. (An image of each building?) You could indeed make them more accessible, or you could just plain delete them. I love the site, you're doing a great job of disseminating information, but some of that stuff just isn't necessary for the outside world to see over the internet, is it?
What's your damage, Heather?
Just because you can create a five-minute Flash flyover of Washington D.C. to play before anyone can get into your site does not mean you should.
I am currently working on a US government web site. (OK, it's a state web site, but they are holding us to the federal rules because they know they're next...) Here's some practical advice:
It's not rocket science once you know what you're doing. Personal anecdote: I applied the same principles to my own web site, even though I didn't have to and my friends told me I was wasting my time because "nobody uses Lynx anymore." In the first week, I got 10 Lynx visitors.
-M
You're smart; what haven't you learned Python yet? http://diveintopython.org/
I don't see any reason that we shouldn't have to customize websites for persons with disabilities.
I can.
A properly-designed web site does not need any customization for persons with disabilities.
A web site which is not universally accessible is an indication of gross incompetence on the part of its designer.
Obviously, not every adornment and photo needs to be described in painstaking detail. But - and this is particularly important on government sites, which exist to make important information available to the public - there should be no frivolous impediments to the transmission of information. And this goes from Day One.
A couple years ago I was with a government agency which, to its credit, decided to get an early move on this and get all its pages accessible.
It was a tremendously valuable project, because running all the pages through Bobby and other validators not only highlighted the pointless inaccessiblities that riddled the web site, but called attention to all the other coding errors and other latent problems lying beneath the surface.
It also made it very clear which of the web developers knew what they were doing, and which were utterly useless goldbrickers, tossing together nonsense using FrontPage when they had claimed to know HTML.
Many of these same people thought it was impossible to have pages that are visually engaging and accessible at the same time. This is precisely because they did not know HTML, and thought that the only things that could show up on the web were the fetid oozings from the back end of FrontPage and its ilk.
So, here's the Rapid Accessibility plan:
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
If the job had been done properly using the tools available at the time this situation would never have come up. I'm sorry but I can't feel bad for a government agency which did a poor job and now wants us to feel sorry for them because they're being told to correct the problem.
Go spend an afternoon browsing through the W3C archives, useit.com, and htmlhelp.com and when you realize that this is nothing new but rather exactly what those with clear vision have been advocating since the dawn of the web maybe you'll just have to crawl back to your post and do your job properly.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
Call the people at the access-board.gov. The regulation only applies to things created/contracted for after June 22, 2001. You do not have to retroactivly alter your entires site. Also note that,
1. Most of the regs, refered to as Section 508 are really just good coding practice (like using alt tags on web sites.)
2. Any disabled person could have sue you since 197X under the ADA and force you to be accessible, you should have been thinking about this all along.
3. This regulation appliies to everything IT related, not just web pages.
Here's a possible solution.
i ng/
s /transcoding/ibmtranscoding/html/proxydemo.htm
The standards don't aim at eliminating graphics and animations, but <quoting> Generally, this means use of text labels or descriptors for graphics and certain format elements. (HTML code already provides an "Alt Text" tag for graphics which can serve as a verbal descriptor for graphics). This section also addresses the usability of multimedia presentations, image maps, style sheets, scripting languages, applets and plug-ins, and electronic forms </quoting>
What if the whole site were transformed into text which could then be read aloud?
IBM's WebSphere Transcoding Publisher was designed as a helper to servers for wireless devices, because it takes normal websites and transforms the *ml into something a wireless devices' browser can handle. It does this on the fly with little or no performance hit, changing sites to text, to voice, resizing and altering images for whatever device you may be browsing from.
In this case, it could transcode a normal website like yours into VoiceML and be read aloud, or into text and be read using the blind users' screen reader. You wouldn't have to redesign anything about your site, except to ensure that disabled users got the properly transcoded site.
It really appears to me as though Transcoding Publisher running on your server would solve your problems.
Look at http://www-4.ibm.com/software/webservers/transcod
and http://www.research.ibm.com/networked_data_system
email me if you want to talk more about it.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close