U S Government Accessibility Deadline Looming
Jeff Howden
Member info
User since: 14 Dec 1998
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.
