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U.S. Government Accessibility Deadline Looming

Posted on June 11, 2001

in News

by Jeff Howden (Jeff Howden)

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Jeff Howden

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User since: December 13, 1998

Last login: June 22, 2011

Articles written: 21

You've heard about it -- maybe even read the warnings. It's too late for second-guessing now. It's do or die time.

An article, Sites for the Blind published by The Standard, has some chilling news for those responsible for U.S. federal government web sites. The deadline to be compliant is June 21, 2001.

Specifically, regulations for Web site accessability state, "Directions and cues for electronic forms must be readable with tools such as screen readers; all information conveyed with color must be available without color; users must be alerted to timed responses and given a chance to signal they need more time to complete a function; pictures and graphics must be tagged with text descriptions."

You may find helpful an article entitled, Making Your Web Site Accessible to the Blind, written by Curtis Chong, Director of Technology, National Federation of the Blind.

Be sure you read the other accessibility articles on evolt.org.

.jeff

Jeff Howden (.jeff) is a web developer working for Vos & Howden, LLC in Portland, Oregon where he's partnered with long-time colleague, Anthony Vos. His skills include ColdFusion, JavaScript, CSS, XML, relational databases, and much, much more. His biggest professional accomplishments include, but are not limited to:

  • building a ColdFusion-based e-commerce solution for Mt. Bachelor that transacted over $1.62 million dollars in September 2001 with 0 (yes, that's zero) ColdFusion errors and then an almost completely rebuilt version transacted $2.86 million dollars in September 2002.
  • being asked to be a Technical Editor for the ColdFusion MX book, Inside ColdFusion MX from New Rider's Publishing company.
  • being asked by BrainBench to perform quality control on their JavaScript 1.5 certification test after receiving the highest beta test score out of 200 testees.
  • managing the server that hosts evolt.org and withstanding a slashdotting that brought over 1,000,000 hits to the site, over 10 gigs of data transfer, and an average in excess of 2300 unique visitor sessions per hour, all within a 24-hour period and the server never hiccuping once.
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Glad I am not Government anymore!

Submitted by Valcor on June 12, 2001 - 13:04.

Good insight and reminder to all Government web workers out there. I was one of these about a year ago and I am glad I left. Not enough pay and I couldn't expand to what I wanted.

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Not just for gov't workers

Submitted by jswiders on June 13, 2001 - 07:11.

While not being a worker for the government anymore may mean you don't *have* to follow their regulations, it's definitely a good idea. Just because it's not required by law doesn't mean your pages don't need to be inaccessible.

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absolutely!

Submitted by pell_mel on June 14, 2001 - 00:42.

you might not have to follow their regulations, but there are compelling reasons to:-

1. you're cutting out customers if you're a commercial site
2. you could end up like SOCOG in australia (sydney olympic games organising committee)- a guy took a test case to the equal opportunities commission to get a ruling on whether the sydney olympics site was discriminatory against vision impaired ppl. (they ruled that it was; he sued them and got $20 000)

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Not saying

Submitted by Valcor on June 14, 2001 - 11:33.

I am not saying you shouldn't and in fact I believe all web developers should take into mind that there are people out there that have disabilities and your page should be able to fill their needs. I might of came across wrong on that post. I will was just mocking people I still knew in the government that are stressing to meet guidelines before the due date. They should have done this at the very beginning like I told them.

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