508 Compliance: Stop Enforcing, Start Innovating
In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Now known affectionately as Section 508, it directs all Federal agencies to ensure that their websites and electronic information are just as accessible to people with hearing or vision impairments so that we don’t create second class citizens when accessing government information.
Enforcing 508 Compliance
This is a laudable approach, but in practice, enforcing 508 compliance has been an uphill struggle, and will continue to be for the forseable future. Here’s a headline from 2007 that explains the basic problem: “Web technologies outpace accessibility law and require a major rewrite of 508 standards“. The pace of innovation always outstrips our standards. This has been and will continue to be an ongoing issue. Complicating things further is in practice, many website efforts start by envisioning fancy interactions only to be stymied later in the development process when they realize their tool of choice isn’t compliant.
Enforcement costs lots of money: Even with the existence of a wonderful site that explains all aspects of 508, many companies now exist in large part for the sole purpose of helping Federal agencies understand and implement 508 compliance. A myriad of different types accessibility checkers have been developed. If you conduct a Google search on 508 Compliance, it returns 394,00 documents. GSA has been tasked with the tough job of enforcing 508, but as late as 2008, found that over 80% of the solicitations for electronic and IT development contained no provisions for accessibility.
~The Right Goal~
Make the Web Fully Accessible to Everyone
Currently the problem frame is that we haven’t been able to enforce 508 compliance standards on Federal websites. Even if we become 100% successful, the best we get is accessible Federal websites. This still leaves large swaths of the internet less accessible to those who are completely blind, color blind, or hearing impaired. The best we can do is “hope” that commercial products and websites test their software for 508 compliance, and that others worry about what is essentially a long tail concern.
~The Solution~
Innovate on the Browser & End-User Hardware Side
We’ve been tackling the wrong side of the equation. Instead of spending millions on education and enforcement, we should instead spend the money and prompting innovation in the browser and specialized hardware. Web accessible innovations in web browsers and associated specialized hardware solutions could make the entire web fully accessible to those with disabilities. My guess is even if we spent 10 million prompting innovation through contests similar to the Wearable Power prize or the DARPA Grand Challenge, we would still be saving lots of money overall. Even if the resultant solutions require subsidies to reduce purchase costs, this would be no different to what we currently do with providing motorized wheelchairs to those who need them.
Examples of Possible Innovations: There could be a variety of innovations that address specific disability concerns. Examples might include:
- Color Transform Browser Plugins for Color Blind users: If someone has red-green color blindness for instance, wouldn’t it be great if the browser automatically changed colors in graphics and text into colors more easily seen? We could imagine a control panel that allowed the user to choose which colors they wanted to see instead.
- Braille Displays that Display Graphics by Converting Each Color into Different Depths: Imagine a blue-yellow-green Venn diagram concentric circle graphic that’s so prevalent in business - only this time the colors are represented as a different height in the braille display. Translating colors into heights make them accessible.
- Automatic Speech to Text Translator plugins: Imagine if YouTube videos and podcasts could automatically create mostly accurate subtitles.
Again, my imagination is limited - I’m sure true innovators could come up with far better solutions.
Federal Accessibility Challenge: The Federal Government should unleash the power of innovation by creating a Federal Accessibility Challenge, where a million dollars is awarded to the best browser solution for each disability category (color blindness, hearing impaired, for instance), and perhaps a three million dollar prize for the best hardware solution for hearing impaired or blind web users. In both cases, the money should be doubled if the solution is an open-source software or open source hardware design.
The bottom line is the goal should be that those with disabilities should be able to get as much benefit and satisfaction out of using the entire web as the rest of us. We should shift the approach from enforcement, and instead spend our energy on innovating.
Good post! You are right that we need to rethink our approach. We need to take accessibility OFF the list of barriers–inaccessible content is the barrier.
Another idea is to rethink the content structure. If we separate the content from the presentation, there could be tools (maybe even browsers) that can make the CONTENT accessible, not the WEBSITE.
Thanks for posting!
Great point, Gwynne - the content accessible independent of the website allows all sorts of new and innovative ways to present and reuse it! There are definitely lots of options for doing this - we just need to figure out seamless ways to “bake this in” to our existing processes.
Good post. Certainly there benefits to putting resources into generating open source extensions for Firefox that would help provide some better support. I’d also like to suggest that there be an emphasis on funding popular open source platforms to become more accessible as well. There are groups like http://groups.drupal.org/accessibility that are working to do this, but with some support could go a lot further. Having a few open source tools that are starting points for 508 agencies to use would be another step in reducing costs and increasing the benefits for all.
Hi Mike, agreed. The overall point is the more we can solve through innovation and built-in goodness the far easier the overall problem becomes. Forcing folks to adhere to standards is just a tough, uphill slog - one that is always many steps behind due to the ever increasing rate of innovation. Lets join the innovation bandwagon instead of fighting it.
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Man, i cant believe kids are doing this now.
The Islander Inn of OIB in NC is perhaps the worst hotel on the island. We had a terrible experience at this nc beach resort. The room was not ready for 45 minutes after our check inn time. So we sat in the sweltering heat for about an hour with two young kids and a dog (which cost us an additional 60 bucks). You might say “why didn’t you guys go on the beach to kill a little bit of time”…which is exactly what we did and resulted in a fine from the OIB Police for having our dog on the beach before 6pm. Our bad, but you think there would be a sign on the hotels enterance to the beach…which is another disaster. You have to go through the pool area to get to the beach cross over…a pool area with two sets of outward swinging safety gates…guests and their kids running around, a maze of lounge chairs, and busted up concrete….did i mention the two kids, the wife, the dog , and bags of kid supplies..uggg. if you are even slightly handycapped i wouldn’t even consider touring this crap hole. All this aside, we finally get the mexican cleaning crew out of our room and decide to relax on the back porch to enjoy the view of the ocean …which was great so long as you ignore the ratteling humm of the rooms a/c unit which is as much a fixture of the decore as the stackable white (mildewed) form-molded pvc chairs. Then the gang of homeless cats arrived (I swear you can’t make this stuff up)…dog is going wild..kids now crying…wife about to freak out…i must react quickly so i go down to the gravel parking lot of the islander inn and shoe them away…but their retreat is just a transient ploy…as soon as i get back up to the porch they are back…only with reinforcemnets to boot…aah, but i am far smarter than a cat…even 10 of them…while the gravel lot was poison to my feet it provided me with some ammunition for a full on assault…i lined the stones along the porches edge just under the railing and waited for the perfect shot. The mangiest of the crew was in sight…my wife diles me in ..”a few clicks to the left”..”you are set”…my foot is drawn back like a driver…fire!!! Hit…Dismay…the vermin thought i was kicking food to them…Yet another defeat…i return inside with hopes that they dont start to nest in our van. The night fanally draws to a tylonol pm induced end and all attempts are made to ignore the rattle and humm of the out dated ac unit…after all who the heck would want to sleep to the sound of that silly ocean. 3AM…EEERT!….EEERT!…EEERT!…EEERT!!!…and i arose to see what was the matter “alarm clock?” “radio?”…”Fire?”…”FIRE!”…”FIRE!” no fire extinguisher in room …may have to exit off 2nd story porch…no fire escape latter…must go uot front door…alls clear we (me, wife, 2 small kids, dog, 2bags kid stuff) make our way to the parking lot. Our building is fine so i go back up get the rest of our stuff and we drive 2 hours home in a van that now smells of cat urine if you use the vents so i can get enough sleep to go to work in the morning. Realy freakin cool way to drop almost 300 bones on a room and about that on gas and food. We call the Islander Inn and are told a manager would contact us…he did not…and continues to avoid our calls…Thank god we put it on our AMEX…they are going to revearse the charges. Still managed to spend a bunch of money on gas, made our entire family miserable, and worked a 10 hour shift that following day on 3 hours of sleep. Thank you Islander Inn NC
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