Is Your Site Accessible?

Wheelchair ramps for the Information Superhighway

Adam Clayton Powell III from the July 1999 issue

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The people drafting the rules believe they should apply to everyone. Who are they? As is customary, the federal government asked interested individuals to nominate themselves to serve on the drafting committee. In this case, Section 508 required consultation with "public or nonprofit agencies or organizations, including organizations representing individuals with disabilities." Not surprisingly, most of those appointed were representatives of such groups as the American Council of the Blind, the American Foundation for the Blind, Easter Seals, the National Association of the Deaf, the National Federation of the Blind, and the United Cerebral Palsy Associations.

Members of the committee assert that the federal government has the power to regulate the form and content of online information--as opposed to print, where the government does not have such power--because the federal government paid for the development of the Internet. "The Internet is subject to market forces, but it didn't start through market forces, it was started by the federal government," said Jenifer Simpson, a committee member and manager of technology initiatives at the President's Committee on Employment of People With Disabilities, in an interview with Ziff Davis. Simpson added that the rights of the disabled must prevail over other considerations. "This is really a civil rights issue," she said.

And if online publishers decline to adopt the committee's new guidelines voluntarily, the guidelines could become mandatory under federal law for all Web sites, according to both Simpson and Judy Brewer, another committee member who is also director of the Web Access Initiative.

Janet Reno believes the new law covers more than just Web sites. "The scope of Section 508 is expansive," she wrote in the memorandum describing the law's jurisdiction, and "potentially includes all telecommunications devices (including telephones, voice-mail systems, pagers, facsimile machines, and related technology) and any technology used to convey, transmit, or receive any kind of information."

The new rules will become final early next year, but it is already possible to see how they would work. For those inside the government, Attorney General Reno announced the creation of a federal Web site (www.508.org) to help Webmasters ascertain whether they are in compliance with the new law. But this site was only accessible from government computers--specifically, according to the attorney general's memorandum, from .gov and .mil domains.

For everyone else, the Web Access Initiative developed and published its own set of proposed guidelines that could be adopted as federal law (www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT). The first guideline requires Web sites to supply text alternatives for all images and graphics. "Thus, a text equivalent for an image of an upward arrow that links to a table of contents could be `Go to table of contents,'" the provision reads. A second provision bars the use of color to convey information unless explanatory text is also available, because "people who cannot differentiate between certain colors and users with devices that have non-color or non-visual displays will not receive the information."

Other requirements prohibit using multiple languages on the same page, because that can hinder translation by braille readers, and discourage the "use (or misuse)" of tables and other formatting that "makes it difficult for users with specialized software to understand the organization of the page or to navigate through it." Yet another provision requires webmasters to "ensure that moving, blinking, scrolling, or auto-updating objects or pages may be paused or stopped" and to design all pages so they are "usable by people without mice, with small screens, low resolution screens, black and white screens, no screens, with only voice and text output, etc."

Another Web site lets online publishers test their sites using some of the suggested guidelines that soon may have the force of federal law behind them. The Center for Applied Special Technology (www.cast.org) has posted free software it calls Bobby, illustrated with an image of a jovial waving policeman. That cheerful logo doubles as a seal of approval that can be downloaded and used by Web sites that meet Bobby's accessibility guidelines. Bobby has already flunked a number of widely used Web sites, including the White House site, where the software identified "13 accessibility problems that should be fixed in order to make this page accessible to people with disabilities."

Bobby may be waving with his right hand, but in his left hand, not visible in the logo, may be a billy club: Section 508.