Section 508 Compliance Case Study
Section 508 Compliance Overview
Many prospective clients call Criterion because they have just been informed that the IT solution they are proposing to a government agency must be Section 508 compliant. What do they do now?
The Challenge
With Section 508 compliance, one of the biggest issues is simply explaining what 508 is and what 508 is not. 508 standards are best viewed as proper development techniques, NOT special development techniques for disabled people. The more your source code complies with industry standards, the more 508 compliant the code will be.
Assuming that your company has excellent programmers, there still are a few issues not normally found in the IT domain when dealing with Section 508 compliance. They include 508 standards, disabilities and assistive technologies and contractual requirements. We will address each issue here:
Section 508 Standards: The standards for 508 testing are relatively straight forward. However, understanding how the agencies evaluate your 508 compliance during their testing process is critical to the optimization of 508 within your products. This knowledge only comes from years of experience interacting with federal employees who have the responsibility for interpreting the 508 testing standards for their agency. Criterion has that knowledge and, just like optimizing an application for IE or Firefox, we can assist you with this process so that everyone is on the same page when interpreting the 508 standards.
Disabilities and Assistive Technologies: To optimize your application for 508 compliance, you need to know your audience. People with disabilities may be blind or partially blind, some may have mobility issues like Cerebral Palsy or paralysis. Others may have auditory issues such as total deafness or partial deafness. Also, people with cognitive disabilities ranging from brain trauma to attention deficit disorder or Down’s Syndrome, utilize technology on a daily basis. Assistive technologies are the tools that disabled people use to interface with applications and hardware to access electronic information.
Since nearly 52% of people with disabilities are gainfully employed, not providing them with 508 compliant technologies would deny a significant percentage of working adults the ability to do their jobs to the best of their abilities and attain new positions with additional responsibilities.
Contractual Requirements: Not all 508 compliance is alike! Depending on the terms of your contract, or the lack of specificity, you may need to gather additional requirements concerning an agency’s expectation for, say, electronic documents. Do they want low level, medium level or high level of 508 accessibility? What are the tradeoffs with the security requirements and particular 508 provisions? What browser or screen reader, and their corresponding versions, should the application be optimized? All of these issues and more will impact the final 508 compliant application that you will deliver to your client.
Criterion’s Solutions
Criterion has designed a uniquely streamlined set of 508 solutions that address the issues above and also provides valuable insight into Section 508 itself, which can be leveraged to achieve significant ROI. Section 508 compliance is an investment in future sales opportunities as well as a demonstration of your organization’s social responsibility with regard to accommodating the needs of disabled client employees and your own employees with disabilities.
It is important to note that Criterion’s 508 testing and training solutions emphasize knowledge transfer. Through direct mentoring and our acclaimed Elearning courses, when we complete a 508 project and certify an application, we also say goodbye for now to a client team who can now manage their own 508 requirements.
However, Criterion is always available to provide support after we have completed a project with our clients. We are happy to discuss 508 marketing opportunities with your marketing and sales forces or join a conference call with company executives to explain ROI of future 508 project work.
If you require additional eLearning course licenses for new developers to your team, we would be happy to have the 508 compliant courses issued within 12 hours.
Just remember that working with Criterion generally results in a long term teaming relationship with regard to 508, usability analysis or corporate communications. As 508 changes in the future, we will be here to assist you to understand how those changes will impact your company and future application development efforts.