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."

Comments

Re:Why worry so much?

[FFFish]

Oh, baloney.

All that has happened is that they're having their hands slapped for being so *stupid* as to design the site so that the "This Page Best Viewed Using MSIE" warning had to be used.

If they'd stuck to the damn *standards*, they'd never have encountered this problem.

Now that they're forced to be smart, the web pages will be viewable not only by disabled-friendly browsers (browsers that provide 500x zoom for the visually impaired; browsers that will read the content to the blind; browsers that will send output to a braille interface), but the pages will also be viewable to people using Palm Pilots, Netscape, Lynx and any other browser.

So what's it gonna take? Not a whole helluva lot: get rid of browser-specific tagging. Get rid of frames. Add ALT text to all images. Provide text descriptions of any animations/Flash/videos.

In other words, they have to do all the things they *SHOULD* have been doing, right from day one.


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Can't feel sorry for ya

[Juggle]

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.

Do Some More Research

[gyges]

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 answer:

[firewort]

Here's a possible solution.

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/transcodi ng/

and http://www.research.ibm.com/networked_data_systems /transcoding/ibmtranscoding/html/proxydemo.htm

email me if you want to talk more about it.

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