Making federal agency Web sites accessible to people with disabilities was -- and is -- a mountain of work for federal agency accessibility experts and Web designers.
"Say I have a Web site with 10,000 pages, which isn't that large. If I find that 3,000 pages have some Section 508 problems, where do I start?" asked David Grant, director of product marketing for Watchfire Corp. The Waltham, Mass., company tests for Web accessibility, privacy and quality.
Web site accessibility calls for compliance with 16 Section 508 standards. The standards require Web designers to do things such as:
- Include text descriptions with all images that represent content, such as photographs
- Ensure that online forms can be filled out by people who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers for the blind
- Synchronize captioning with audio and video presentations on the Web.
Watchfire's enterprise testing platform conducts automated analysis of large, complex Web sites to find and prioritize accessibility problems for the employees who will fix them.
"We can tell you which are the most-visited pages; these are the ones you have to worry about first," Grant said.
The company's analysis of eight agency Web sites recently showed that half met all the Section 508 requirements and half did not. But it's tough to give agencies a pass or fail grade, Grant said, because a single error on a page means the site is not fully compliant.
"There are some areas agencies are really struggling with, like PDF files. They have a lot of older files that don't support accessibility plugins, and now they're trying to retrofit them. That's a long, expensive process," he said.
Watchfire analyzed the Web sites of the Defense Logistics Agency; Education, Energy and Labor departments; Library of Congress; International Trade Commission; and Sen. Ted Kennedy's office and the Senate (both of which are not required to comply with Section 508). The departments of Education and Energy, the International Trade Commission and Kennedy's site met all the Section 508 standards.
Among the other four agencies, all had instances of not providing alternative text to explain images such as photographs. Some also lacked text explanations for "spacer images," design elements that don't contribute content to the page. It is important to include text for these images because without it, blind people using screen readers will know they're missing something, but they won't know if it's important, according to Watchfire's analysis.
Within the government today, Web site accessibility is in a slow-growth phase, said Bob Regan, senior product manager for accessibility at software developer Macromedia Inc. of San Francisco.
"Most agencies now have good, high-level thought on accessibility," Regan said. "The challenge now is getting rolling-chair experts dispersed through the agencies, so designers can roll their chairs over to someone and ask 'How do you do this?' "
Even if only 25 percent of federal Web content was accessible today, he hypothesized, "that means one in four [designers] are rolling-chair experts in federal offices -- I think that's incredible. And the last 75 percent is a lot easier than the first 25 percent."
