Section 508 At long last, two of the most looming accessibility questions in the United States have been answered

At long last, two of the most looming accessibility questions in the United States have been answered. What is the deadline for becoming digitally accessible? What types of content must be accessible?

Section 508 This January, the United States Access Board announced updates to national accessibility requirements beneath Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. While the refresh is limited to federal agencies and any business that sells to or receives funds from a federal agency, Section 508 will have long-lasting effects across all industries. Until now, U.S. accessibility laws were not aligned with the worldwide Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). These guidelines, already recognized in most developed countries, address many disabilities pertaining to vision, color perception, cognition, manual dexterity, and more. This announcement may significantly alter companies’ timelines of becoming digitally accessible: American agencies and companies that are affected will have until January 18, 2018 to become compliant.

Section 508 Once these rules are published in the National Register, federal agencies and businesses that sell to or receive funds from federal agencies have 12 months to become compliant. The Department of Justice and Department of Education will continue to enforce accessibility compliance by investigating formal complaints made through their respective Offices for Civil Rights.

WHAT CONTENT NEEDS TO BE ACCESSIBLE?

Section 508 Section 508 standards apply to computer hardware and software, websites, and multimedia. Each of these must comply with WCAG 2.0 criteria levels of A and AA, which entail the most critical elements to making the user experience accessible. Website content including text, images, video, forms, animations, and more must be easily accessible to those with disabilities by incorporating header tags, alt attributes, and other elements. Creating new content with accessibility in mind or retrofitting existing content may seem overwhelming, but it is entirely doable.

USE PROPER “ALT” ATTRIBUTES ON VISUAL CONTENT The “alt” attribute (alternative text) is a crucial element of every image, video, or other non-textual content. The function of the alt text is to provide assistive devices, and search engines, with an accurate description of the visual media being displayed on your website. Since assistive devices and search engines can’t actually “see” images or video, they identify it by reading the HTML code for <img> or <video> tags. While these tags indicate that an image or video is present, it is the “alt” attribute that describes what is actually being shown on the page. The “alt” attribute provides a description of what the image is portraying.

IDENTIFY LINK LOCATIONS Especially if the link opens in a new window! For users with disabilities, they may not be able to easily identify where a particular link will take them. Providing a clear description of where links will redirect users is good practice in general, but especially useful for disabled users who rely on assistive devices to navigate web pages. Many assistive devices allow users to scan webpages by displaying a list of links. This means that they will be skipping the text in between, and lose some of the context surrounding those links. While the average user might be able to interpret the preceding text to determine where a link that says “Click Here” might take them, an assistive device cannot provide that context and distinguish the link locations for 10 links that all read “Click Here”.

HELPFUL LINKS 18F Accessibility Checklist 508 Laws The full section 508 standards The Accessibility Project Accessibility Blog ARIA practical Examples CFPB's building accessible interfaces guide Creating Accessible PDFs GSA's 508 Policies Making Files Accessible PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint Required fixes for PDFs 10 Free Screen Readers For Blind Or Visually Impaired Users Web Accessibility Perspectives Caption Video Content