Government Usability and Accessibility Standards

[Narasinha]

I followed a link tonight from the Webnauts.net Web Accessibility & Usability Initiative Forum. The link goes to a U.S. Governemnt web site at http://usability.gov/. I found it odd that the site belongs to the National Cancer Institute. The tout their site as being "Your resource for designing useable, useful and accessible Web sites and user interfaces."

Well, I looked at the site using Opera (7.12) and checked out the look of the page without style sheets, with accessibility layout, text browser emulation, etc. How odd that it didn't seem to look very good with any of those options. On a lark I went to the W3C's web validator to see how it came out. Wouldn't you know it. It didn't validate. No encoding was specified. Okay, I forgave that, set the encoding override to ISO-8859-1, and ran it again. Still no good. The DOCTYPE specifies 4.01 transitional, and it isn't even that. No ALT attribute specified for an image. A background image specified for a table cell within the HTML where it isn't allowed. Lots of non-SGML characters (notably ?) are present. The page is laid out with tables rather than CSS. Disable the tables and it really looks horrible.

So, I went to one of the links to their page about accessibility and Section 508. There was a link to the Section 508 web site (http://www.section508.gov/). Now there's a site that ought to be in compliance with everything... or so I thought.

The home page has the following paragraph about Section 508:

Originally Posted by The Section 508 Web Site

Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. The Center for Information Technology Accommodation (CITA), in the U.S. General Services Administration's Office of Governmentwide Policy, has been charged with the task of educating Federal employees and building the infrastructure necessary to support Section 508 implementation. Using this web site, Federal employees and the public can access resources for understanding and implementing the requirements of Section 508.

A link near the bottom of the page with the text [b]Accessibility (08/15/2002) OGP-CIO[b] takes you to a page with this information:

Originally Posted by The Section 508 Web Site

OGP 508 Statement

Checked for Section-508 compliance by OGP-CIO

We are committed to ensure that our site remains accessible to everyone and compliant with the Section 508 standards. If you have any difficulties in accessing the information given in any of our documents or need further assistance, please contact the webmaster at section.508@gsa.gov or call 202-219-0384.

Thank you visiting Section508.gov.

So, of course, I ran their home page through the W3C HTML validator. *BUZZ* Uh uh... Nope, not valid 4.01 transitional. The character encoding in the meta tag (iso-8859-1) doesn't match the HTTP header (utf-8). But that's just the start. 70 errors later... Wow. That's impressive. I don't think I've ever had that many errors on one of my pages.

Okay, so much for valid HTML. But that shouldn't mean they aren't accessible, right? Let me see what Bobby has to say. Who's Bobby? Bobby is a program at watchfire.com which will check pages for basic accessibility requirements. You can take a look at it at http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp. Let's see what it thinks of Section 508's home page for U.S. Section 508 Guidelines. It passes the automatic checks, but that's the easy part. The user checks are the hard part, and it's often tough to be objective about them.

Well, first off, they hard-code font sizes based on pixels. Not good style, but then again, not a true 508 violation. Page layout done with Tables. I guess it's okay as long as you put in the summary="Table used for design purposes only." element.

I guess Section 508 requirements aren't that tough to meet. Bobby can also test for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. Doesn't look like it measures up for that.

1. Use relative sizing and positioning (% values) rather than absolute (pixels).

2. Make sure event handlers do not require use of a mouse.

3. Separate adjacent links with more than whitespace.

How does usability.gov stand up to Bobby?

On 508 compliance:
1. Provide alternative text for all image map hot-spots (AREAs).

On Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0:
1. Provide alternative text for all image map hot-spots (AREAs).

2. Use relative sizing and positioning (% values) rather than absolute (pixels). (21 instances!!!)

3. Provide a summary for tables. (5 instances)

4. Identify the language of the text. (1 instance)

5. Separate adjacent links with more than whitespace. (3 instances)

Well, none of that even takes into account the user checks. These simply disqualify the pages based on automatic tests.

What does all of this mean? For me it means that U.S. Section 508 guidelines for accessibility (when applied to web sites) really don't mean a whole lot. Personally, I think they should be more strict. I'd prefer them comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. That's the compliance I'm shooting for with my site.

Do you know someone who uses a screen reader to browse the web? Do you know someone who is physically unable to use a mouse and browses via their keyboard or other means? Have them check out these sites to see how accessible they are in a real-life situation. Get their feedback, and make sure the owners of those sites, our federal government, knows about any problems they have. That information is supposed to be made available and accessible to those with disabilities.

How odd it is that I'm holding myself to a higher standard then that to which our government is holding itself. Then again, maybe that's not so strange after all.

Regards,
Narasinha

[carbonize]

Recently I have tried to make the sites I make more accesible. I use the watchfire tests etc. But this brings up the same question I raised in web design, and that is just how out of your way are you going to go to make yourself accessible to the most people?

My question at the time was in regards to making your sites render correctly on older browsers but applies equally to this. If you're a big company then you are legally bound to make your site accessible to disabled people just as you are with your shops and offices. But what about the rest of us?

[Webnauts]

Carbomize did you read my article "Why Accessibility and Usability is Important to You?" http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=6146

If not, please have a look. If you still have questions, please feel free to post them!

[carbonize]

I'm well aware of how important accesibility is when running a business. My comment was should we worry about it as much for personal sites? And what about all the Flash designers out there? how do you make an accessible Flash site other than making a HTML alternative (which is good practise I admit).

In a recent revamp of a clients site I ran it through the accesibilty tests and it passed with flying colours, www.stationeryfirst.co.uk is the site if you want to see. I even use proper descriptions in my alt tags unlike a lot of sites that use them for keyword spamming instead.